Give us them both. We will kill the kid, too.

It's brutal when you put it that way, so the men in suits who sit down in front of the microphones under the glare of the television lights don't put it that way. They couch it in terms of who has the best evidence, whose death penalty is the most flexible. But make no mistake, it boils down to ten words.

Give us them both. We will kill the kid, too.

And the thing is, the two people they want, the man and the kid, deserve to die. If we could chart the human spirit, the cartographers would put these two people in the dark corners, the place where maps used to read "There Be Monsters".

Yes, even today, there be monsters.

We want them gone, the monsters. We rightly hate them, what they have done, the anguish they have caused.

Give us them both. We will kill the kid, too.

An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. Justice. We want justice.

Justice.

We've had our monsters in Canada, too. There was the monster who killed Barbara Stoppel, a shop clerk. There was the monster who killed Gail Miller, a nursing aide. There was the monster who killed sixteen-year-old Sandy Seale. There was the monster who killed nine-year-old Christine Jessop.

And the police brought these monsters in front of the cameras, sent them through the justice system which convicted them, and put them in prison. We don't have the death penalty here in Canada, haven't since 1976, so we couldn't kill these monsters.

But we wanted to.

Justice.

An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. A life for a life.

And then a few years down the road science got better and it turned out that the four men who had been convicted, the four men we thought were the monsters, were innocent.

Thomas Sophonow

David Milgaard

Donald Marshall

Guy Paul Morin

Four innocent men would be dead now if we had the death penalty.

Justice.

If I could be sure the justice system never made an error, I would support the killing of murderers. The fewer monsters that walk amongst us the better, as far as I'm concerned.

But it does make errors.

Living, breathing, flesh and blood errors who would have been murdered for crimes they did not commit if we had the death penalty.

Thomas Sophonow

David Milgaard

Donald Marshall

Guy Paul Morin

When we give the state the right to kill, it kills on our behalf. Had those four innocent men been put to death, in the final reckoning I would have been as much their murderer as the police who got it wrong, the courts that got it wrong, and the men who did the actual killing.

Justice.

There are times when we have to do difficult things in the name of justice. And for me, personally, that means that we leave the murderers to slowly rot away one day at a time in prison, rather than take the speedy pleasure of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life.

I believe we have to. I deeply believe if we get it wrong even once, if we murder even one innocent person in the name of justice, then we be monsters, too.

You know, there is safety in silence.

It is much simpler at times to just keep your opinions to yourself, to keep your head down. Especially right now, when there are angry people howling for a quicker justice. Minds are made up. I know that what I have said will only anger them more.

But sometimes, sometimes you have to break your silence and leave your comfort zone.

Yes, there be monsters, people who murder, who walk beyond everything that makes us human and into a darkness that's truly terrifying.