Henry Jackson Jr Execution: Sisters Request Mercy June 5, 2012, 1:45 pm There is really only one rationale for the death penalty: Vengeance. Supporters of capital punishment talk about deterrence, but there's scant evidence that the threat of dying at the hands of the state actually reduces violent crime. On the contrary, as Princeton's Peter Singer wrote in October, "murder rates in Europe and other Western industrialized nations are lower, often much lower, than those in the US. In the US itself, the 16 states that have abolished the death penalty generally have lower murder rates than those that retain it. So we're left with retribution, a meager justification that seems especially paltry when the victim's family - which society supposedly avenges along with the actual victim - calls for mercy. The Associated Press reported yesterday that two women in Mississippi are asking the governor to spare their brother, Henry Jackson Jr., from execution "even though he stabbed one of them, killed four of their children, and paralyzed another." One sister told the governor that she "just can't take any more killing." The other explained: "We are not asking you to take pity on [our brother], we're asking you to show US mercy." Some co-victims, certainly, believe that those who take life should pay with their lives. But the Mississippi sisters are hardly outliers in claiming that another killing won't bring closure, or some kind of satisfaction. Before Connecticut abolished the death penalty, relatives of murder victims wrote an open letter to the Legislature saying that "the death penalty, rather than preventing violence, only perpetuates it and inflicts further pain on survivors."