Admittedly, capital punishment is not a pleasant topic. However, one does not have to like the death penalty in order to support it any more than one must like major surgery, radiation, or chemotherapy when treating cancer. Ultimately we may learn how to cure cancer with a simple pill someday. Unfortunately, that is not yet possible. Today we are faced with the choice of letting the cancer spread out or trying to cure it with the methods available, methods that one day will almost certainly be considered crude. But to give up and do nothing would be far less effective and would certainly delay the discovery of an eventual cure. The analogy between cancer and murder is imperfect, because the “disease” is injustice, not murder. We may not like the death penalty, but it must be available to punish crimes of cold-blooded murder, cases in which any other form of punishment would be inadequate and, therefore, unjust. If we create a society in which injustice is not tolerated, incidents of murder—the most evident form of injustice——will diminish.