The employment of lethal force is perhaps the greatest power afforded a state by its citizens. Thus the death penalty debate is ill-suited for those who would shrink from the implications of either its deployment or abrogation.

I am opposed to the death penalty. But my opposition is tempered by the belief that Americans support capital punishment for real and substantial reasons. The unfortunate fact of humanity is that it tends to regularly birth butchers who think nothing of concealing their work beneath a seductive mask of victimhood.

Thirty years ago, Roger Keith Coleman raped and stabbed to death his sister-in-law Wanda McCoy in the mining town of Grundy, Va. Sentenced to die, Coleman spent the rest of his life seducing activists and enrolling them to the cause of his innocence. On the eve of his death, Coleman was awarded a platform by the likes of “Good Morning America,” “Today,” “Larry King Live” and Time magazine. Meanwhile, McCoy’s family, and the small town of Grundy, endured the scornful eye of the nation and the implicit inference that hicks from Appalachia were set upon enacting frontier justice. So convinced were Coleman’s advocates, that after his execution in 1992, they pressed for postmortem DNA tests. Those tests confirmed Coleman’s guilt.

Whenever tempted by moral dudgeon, it should be remembered that abolishing the death penalty would mean asking decent people to tolerate the lives of criminals who revel in the abuse of that tolerance. Opposing the death penalty is not rooted simply in the pursuit of justice, but, perhaps more firmly, in understanding the world’s fundamental injustice, and the ease with which an attempt to permanently balance the scales ultimately imbalances them further. For want of this lesson, Texas may well have executed an innocent man.

Whatever one thinks of the death penalty, the accounts of those who would seek to conceal the results of their theory should be closely checked. If only for that reason, the prospect of Governor Perry as commander in chief induces a chilling nostalgia. Indeed, choosing a leader of the free world from the ranks of those who sport a self-serving incuriosity is a habit, like crash landings and cock-fights, best cultivated in strict moderation.

Once a century should suffice.