"At The Guard" newspaper of Ministry of Interior Affairs of Byelorussia. March 28, 1995, p. 3.

By V. Milkovski, member of coordinators' council of movement "Belaruski Intelektualny Resurs" (Byelorussian Intellectual Resource)

A very old dispute (it seems to me, since ancient times) goes on and on in the world: must or must not death penalty exist. I am for termination of polemics that lasted for ages on behalf of humanity and virtue. Just some thesis prepared for a reader follow:

Death penalty exists thousands of years, but crimes do not disappear. Never a time will come when we can abolish bloodshed law because of it is not necessary. Vain waiting just makes the situation worse.

Is it permissible to extirpate evil by killing evil makers? It means to multiply the number of evil makers (Blase Pascal).

The modern education system promotes criminality; nearly every family, an indifferent society and the state do too, because all of them are far from perfection and need their own perfection most of all.

If criminals really are born to be criminals, then medicine and science should prevent future crimes.

How terrible must a mental decay of people of our world be to make them believe that their life will be worse if they stop to execute, to torture, to kill and to hang each other (Leo Tolstoy).

Destroying a criminal physically, we just begin to kick and punch after the fight is already over. Much more wise it is not to allow a man to make evil.

Every rational man punishes not because an offense was committed, but because it must not be committed in future (Seneca).

Let me demand to establish death penalty for those who will kill, and it would be quite logical to execute me first, because according to my opinion, a murderer must be at least doomed.

If death penalty is used, then it is incapable to stop evil. It will not extirpate evil, because it is needed all the time. Death penalty will be really needed when it must already be abolished, because it is not needed any more, when it will have corrected bad customs already. Thus, death penalty is of no sense.

A demand of death penalty reveals a cultural level of those who demand it. They are blind and do not see ways to make others better, to correct others and themselves: if they did see ways to self-perfection, they would provide them to others too.

If we are to act according to one of basic principles of death penalty, a ruler of state that could not reeducate future criminals should be executed himself.

Those who use death penalty are much like a man who breaks an electric lamp instead of just turning it off.

A state should remove possibilities of committing crimes, but not to execute citizens for faults and incapability of the state himself. Existence of a death law shows imperfection and weakness of a state.

It is better to pardon dozens of criminals than execute one innocent (Yekaterina II, Queen of Russia). As we can see, the queen was closer to the ideal than we, her descendents, with our "humane" laws.

You must judge each criminal as if he was your own son (Mark Twain).