My heart goes out to the families of these little girls, Krystal Tobias (age 9) and Laura Hobbs (age 8), who were allegedly murdered by Laura’s father, Jerry Hobbs, in the woods outside Zion, Illinois.

Every so often a case like this happens and it forces me to re-think my views on the death penalty. Watching MSNBC last night, former profiler Cliff Van Zandt said (I paraphrase), “you don’t take a rabid dog in for counseling; you put him down. That’s what needs to happen to this sociopath; put him down.”

And there’s so much of me that agrees with him. I have an eight-year-old niece and if something like that happened to her, I would really hope that the police find the killer before I did. Some killers are just sociopathic; there is no hope for them, they have no redeeming qualities, their minds are broken, they are human predators, and the natural instinct is to put them down.

But then I read the statistics on the death penalty. I read about the racial disparities that put black and Latino men to death at far higher rates than whites. I read about the death row inmates who have been exonerated thanks to DNA evidence. I cannot stomach the idea of putting to death of even one innocent man just so we can have the satisfaction of exterminating human vermin.

Then there’s Jerry Hobbs, Jeffrey Dahmer, Timothy McVeigh, and other killers whose acts are so heinous and the proof is so incontrovertible that not killing them seems to be a travesty of justice. Part of me thinks “why should we spend the thousands of dollars it will take to keep them in prison for life when lethal injections are cheap?” Then the other part thinks, “why should these killers get the easy way out of a painless death? Why shouldn’t they have to spend the rest of their lives in the miserable existence of prison, thinking for the rest of their days about their crimes.”

I guess I’m not so against the killing of killers, I’m against the flawed system that might kill an innocent. You might say I’m 52% against the death penalty. OK, make it 51% after this news…