As the Christian Science Monitor recently put it, "The best way to resolve the controversy would be to put this form of punishment on the shelf of history, as most other modern democracies have. State-sanctioned killing is at odds with the need to reduce the level of violence in society." America would then join most of the modern industrial world, which has abandoned capital punishment "out of some embarrassed sense that it is a barbaric vestige of an archaic culture," as the writer Russell Baker recently observed.
— Robert Jay Lifton, Greg Mitchell, Russell Baker, Who Owns Death? by Robert Jay Lifton, Greg Mitchell