Here is what he wrote:

“From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored — indeed, I have struggled, along with a majority of this Court — to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the mere appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. … Rather than continue to coddle the Court’s delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved and the need for regulation eviscerated, I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed .”

Nancy Blackmun

Needham, Mass.

To the Editor:

After carefully reading Nicholas Kristof’s piece, I respectfully disagree with him. I grew up in the heart of the Ted Bundy years, and several of my neighbors were murdered by him (I did not know them personally). He murdered at least 30 young women — perhaps as many as 100 — most savagely .

When I heard about his execution , it was like lancing a boil. He destroyed the lives of more people than just his victims and never once shed a tear of remorse.

As a progressive independent voter, I am still firmly for the death penalty. It is people like Ted Bundy who have galvanized my belief. To be blunt, the death penalty is a form of societal revenge.

Doug Leen

Petersburg, Alaska

To the Editor:

I only wish Nicholas Kristof had extended his excellent article to criticize the death by incarceration with which some states (including New York) have heedlessly replaced the death penalty. The “life without parole” sentences now handed out more and more frequently condemn thousands of people to a slow but inevitable death behind bars, in brutal, cruel conditions that are now coming to public attention. As these sentences become more common, they will keep feeding the crisis of mass incarceration.

The answer is not just to remove the death penalty but to transform our thinking and our system to reflect the reality that everyone can change, that most people at age 50 are far different from who we were at 18, 19 or even 30, and that long sentences serve no purpose other than promoting vengeance and violence and filling our prisons with people whose incarceration does nothing to promote public health and safety.

Laura Whitehorn

New York

The writer is a co-founder of Release Aging People in Prison.

To the Editor:

A comment in Nicholas Kristof’s death penalty piece irritates me. He mentions that Clifford Williams Jr. had “a public defender,” insinuating that because his attorney was employed by a public defender office, that attorney’s work was sloppy and contributed to Mr. Williams’s conviction. Mr. Williams probably had a bad attorney, but his legal representation wasn’t bad just because he had a “public defender.” To condemn the work done by the thousands of overworked and underpaid public defenders in this country in one broad brush stroke is egregious.