No reasonable person expected Joshua Komisarjevsky to be sentenced to anything but death for the heinous murders of Jennifer Hawke-Petit and their daughters, Hayley Petit, 17 years old, and Michaela Petit, 11, in Cheshire, Connecticut.  And the jury obliged.

The only real question was fast or slow.  And fast, a sentence that he be put to death, is a misnomer.  Since 1937, only two people were put to death in Connecticut, the last in 2005, when Michael Ross was executed for serial murder committed between 1981 and 1984. 

The death penalty is a matter of religion, some certain of its necessity while others certain of its barbarity.  The sides argue the point regularly, but it only plays to those who already share the same religion.  Nobody is persuaded to convert because of the zeal and fervor of adherents to another religion. Komisarjevsky, with his co-defendant Stephen Hayes, also sentenced to death, certainly aren’t the poster boys for the anti-death penalty adherents. There was no doubt of their guilt, and the crime was just horrible.

Other states, more inclined toward putting people to death, make for a more serious debate over the death penalty, as guilt is at issue and the crimes are more pedestrian murders.  But not here. Not in Connecticut.  In the case of the Cheshire murders, it’s purely religion.

Except that those whose faith supports the execution of the killers are of the belief that the extra bit of retribution that comes of pushing the plunger, flipping the switch, lighting the pyre, matters. In this respect, the sentence of Komisarjevsky and Hayes makes for the perfect focal point of debate, unladen by the collateral issue of innocence.  Even race, a very real and, in other places, overarching failure of the capital punishment elsewhere, plays no role here. 

No matter what the jury decided, Komisarjevsky was going to be sentenced to death.  The only question was whether it was going to take as long as nature required, or it was going to come in a few decades when the plunger is pushed. 

At the moment, with Cheshire still fresh in the minds of those paying attention to the case, this seems to matter.  And it seems to matter a great deal.  Will it matter as much 20 years from now?  Will both Komisarjevsky and Hayes still be alive 20 years from now?  Will the visceral need to inflict pain and fear, to do harm in return for harm, still be there 20 years from now?

When the Supreme Court held that the death penalty was unconstitutionally arbitrary in Furman v. Georgia, and states could no longer put people to death, until the Supremes changed their mind in Gregg v. Georgia, the debate continued to rage.  The reaction could have been that we were satisfied with putting these heinous killers to death slowly, but that wasn’t good enough for the majority of Americans.  They demanded death.

The arguments against the death penalty, in a vacuum, hardly seem to be capable of satisfying the religion of its supporters.  They just don’t seem to turn enough heads, if any, to change things.  While the argument of innocence, applicable in other cases, carries significantly more suasion, there is a disconnect between those who are unquestioningly guilty, not realizing that they have no ability to draw the dividing line between those who are definitely guilty from those who, 20 years later, turn out not to be but surely seemed definitely guilty at the time.  It’s hard to break down religious beliefs with reason. There is no intersection between the two.

The only question is whether the sense of immediate retribution that comes from the imposition of the death penalty, as opposed to the longer term retribution that comes from the imposition of a sentence of life without parole, will do the trick.  If the name of the sentence, life without parole, were changed to “long death sentence,” would that be sufficient to satisfy the need to respond to brutality with brutality?

The discussion over the sentence of Komisarjevsky and Hayes has been raw and emotional.  It hasn’t been burdened much by thought or reason.  There just isn’t much by way of thought or reason that contributes to the discussion.  There are only two things that really merit much consideration.  First, that both of the defendants will ultimately die at the hand of the state.  Second, that death by lethal injection brings at most a brief sense of satisfaction to those who believe in the faith of capital punishment. 

For Dr. William Petit, his family is still gone.  For the followers of the religion, they will go back to their lives and jobs, as Komisarjevsky and Hayes will spend the next 20 years having the details of their punishment scrutinized.  It’s not like they get to enjoy a good execution on TV next week.

And even if this doesn’t apply to either of these killers, it’s not a bad thing if the execution takes a while, just in case science is improved or witnesses change their claims and it turns out that the definitely guilty person isn’t as guilty as they seemed.

Either way, if they are guilty, they get the death penalty, and people of all religions can come together and pray.  No matter which faith captures your heart, there is no choice but death.  And it’s not entirely clear that one is worse than the other.

Update: More on the issue, by someone who has an intimate familiarity with the death penalty that I do not, read Jeff Gamso’s Dog Bites Man.