What About Innocents Who Are Executed?

I devoted my last column to the Torah’s insistence on taking the life of murderers. I noted that this was the only law in all five books of the Torah; that, unlike every other time the Torah calls for capital punishment, only with regard to murder is the death penalty declared a value; and that God gave this law to Noah, not to the Jews alone, as a fundamental basis of civilization.

No response from my readers — published in The Jewish Journal online or in print — dealt with these issues. I would have respected the responses more if the correspondents had simply said, “The Torah is wrong; I am more moral than the Torah on this issue.”