A flu shot's pin prick of pain was momentary but long enough to put me in mind of another kind of injection. Each time a convicted murderer is strapped down onto his or her death-bound gurney, the state extracts its price for a heinous crime but at what price to our society?

Not too many years ago, a very disturbed young mother in South Carolina strapped her two little boys into the backseat of the family car and then plunged it into a nearby lake. When her crime was revealed, members of her community shouted at the arresting officers, "Give her to us!" The news footage showed hundreds of citizens, faces contorted with rage, seeking vengeance for the two murdered children. One mother, holding her own three year old child, screamed an ugly epithet at the murderer. And ugly does indeed describe the scene, as ugly as anything I can remember.

It is, I believe, entirely natural to have a sense of vengeance, even hatred rise within us when we contemplate the evil work that people are capable of. It is natural but I am not so sure it is good. Surely one of the marks of a progressive society is the ability to rise above such feelings as revenge and hatred to others, even those who perpetrate such horror in our midst.

"Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord," and part of that reasoning may be that vengeance is never a rewarding proposition. In my own experience as counselor to many who have been hurt by the horrors of life, I have yet to find any example of someone taking revenge where it was of ultimate satisfaction and benefit. Indeed, the experiences I have been privy to point toward the reality that forgiveness brings far greater fulfillment than anything else.

I certainly recognize how glib this all can sound coming from someone who has not been the victim of such violence. I can only report of the horrors I have seen, the horrifying effects of lives consumed by vengeance.

Millions of people in recent years have become acquainted with Sister Helen Prejean. Her book, Dead Man Walking, was made into a successful motion picture starring Sean Penn. The picture did a good job of conveying the ambiguity that surrounds the implementation of the death penalty. It is not quite as final as one would suppose.

Sister Prejean has dedicated her life by entering into that ambiguity. She has reached out to both the perpetrator and the victim, trying to find some means of bringing our society to a higher level of civilization. She makes no excuses for these despised men and women who occupy death row. She believes they certainly deserve to be punished. Many deserve to be incarcerated for the rest of their lives. What they don't deserve, according to this nun, is to be put to death. No one, not even the most vile of perpetrators deserves that and she makes a worthy case to back it up.

Her arguments are formidable. They include volumes of statistics that show that most death row inmates have been denied the right of competent counsel. The vast majority are poor and relied on court appointed and overworked attorneys to plead their cases. They are disproportionately black. A recent study showed that someone convicted of killing a white person in Georgia is eleven times more likely to get the death penalty than someone convicted of killing a black person. Grimly, she even shows how it is far more economical to keep a person in prison for the rest of their life than to execute them. But her most impressive argument is the simplest. Sister Helen suggests that perhaps what an execution shows is that the state can kill as well as anyone else and that what people learn from such an example is that when you have a really bad problem with someone, what you do is kill him.