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People say: "If you have killed, you deserve to die". But that's a slogan, not an argument. Most murderers aren't sentenced to death, so judges and juries don't generally agree with it. The Declaration of Independence disagrees, too: it says the right to life is "unalienable". That means it can't be taken away from you. And that radical left-wing organization, the Catholic Church, also opposes the death penalty, because it believes that life is sacred and no-one - no-one - is beyond redemption.

Now Robert Pickton has just been convicted of killing maybe 40 prostitutes. He will get life imprisonment, since Canada doesn't have the death penalty. What can Pickton possibly do to redeem himself?

Let's ask a simple question: why don't you or I go around killing prostitutes? Is it because we're deterred by the threat of punishment? No, it's because we find the idea revolting. We have normal feelings like sympathy, empathy, guilt and remorse that Pickton lacks. Pickton is a psychopath, and psychopaths by definition lack those feelings.

Now brain science is a happening field. Recent research seems to be uncovering th seat of empathy (so-called "mirror neurons", and maybe a part of the brain called the amygdala, which is responsible for "emotional memory"). Studying people like Pickton (I'm not talking about anything inhumane, but brain scans, DNA studies, hormone levels, blood and brain chemistry) can help us figure out what's abnormal about him, and how these brain systems work. That would be good for science for its own sake, but it would also potentially help us (1) diagnose people like Pickton early and maybe keep an eye on them, (2) catch them sooner, (3) potentially someday cure them.

So Pickton can potentially contribute in those ways. And he will be put to work in jail and made to earn his keep. To a limited extent, he can be a useful, productive citizen. On the other hand, it's been estimated that in the U.S. a capital case costs $460,000 more than a non-capital case, death row is more expensive than plain jail, and death-row inmates can't work for security reasons. Given that the average death-row convict spends 15 years there, it's actually more expensive to kill them than keep them alive. The money saved can be used to improve policing and help victims.

But back to the subject of redemption. There have been actually been cases of people who have done great things after committing murder. In the 16th century, Carlos Gesualdo

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