Anchorage Daily News

Nikiski state Rep. Mike Chenault served notice on his colleagues last week: Next session, he will push to reinstate the death penalty in Alaska.

If he does, it will be a distraction the next Legislature doesn't need. Legislators have only 90 days to do their work each session, so they don't have time for tough-on-crime posturing. Over the years, Alaska legislators have shrugged off similar calls to reinstate the death penalty, and for good reason.

The death penalty is state-sanctioned, premeditated revenge killing. It is the kind of barbaric "justice" practiced in countries like Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia and Zimbabwe.

Besides, to an offender sentenced to life imprisonment without parole, the burden of knowing you will live your entire life in prison can be a fate worse than death.

Like all human institutions, the justice system is imperfect. Sometimes innocent people are sentenced to die. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 128 inmates who were exonerated or didn't get fair trials have been freed from death row since 1973, when legal executions resumed in the U.S. With the death penalty, the chance of irreversible error is too high.

Back in 2003, during a local anti-death penalty event, Florence Ward offered Alaskans a healthy perspective on the subject. Her niece was one of four youths killed by Charles Meach in Russian Jack Springs Park in 1982. Ward said Meach fully deserved his 396-year prison sentence, but she didn't want to see him put to death.

"I just think there's so many inequities in it," Ward said. "I personally couldn't do it, and I'm not about to ask anyone to do it."

As Alaska anti-death penalty activist Kathy Harris wrote in 2001:

"Executions don't just take the lives of murderers; they erode our own lives as well. They usher us to the dark side of human nature, where the suffering and death of someone who has wronged us is morbidly satisfying."

For as long as Alaska has been a state, we have lived and prospered without the death penalty. There is no need to restore it.

BOTTOM LINE: Rep. Chenault, your colleagues have way more important work to do next year.

Alaska Notebook

Adopt a chaplain

"It's a magic hat," said Dick Henningsen, who runs the Adopt-A-Chaplain program at Trinity Presbyterian Church in Anchorage.

The hat Henningsen spoke of sported the words "Adopt-A-Chaplain." The magic occurred at Best Buy, where a manager read the hat, listened to Henningsen explain the need for an X-Box 360 for a chaplain's morale tent in Afghanistan. This was when the X-Box was red hot and in short supply. Henningsen recalled the manager's response.

"Oh, I think we can find one that has some dust on it." After that, CompUSA and other retailers either donated or discounted X-Box games, and in the end church members were able to send a $1,000 game package.

Henningsen, an Air Force veteran, said his church and other contributors have teamed to ship 360 care packages to chaplains in Iraq and Afghanistan over the last 20 months. Right now they're supporting four chaplains, including three Army chaplains from Fort Wainwright and Fort Richardson.

The Anchorage contribution is part of what's become a nationwide effort of churches, one that since its founding in 2005 to March of this year has shipped more than 14,000 boxes of comfort food and supplies to chaplains to help U.S. troops at war -- and the people of the countries where those troops are fighting.

People can contribute on-line at Adopt-A-Chaplain.org, or organize locally as Henningsen and his wife, Barbara, have done at their church. Generally, the organization will try to match chaplains and churches of like faith. Self-described as "Christ-centered," the program is nonprofit, nondenominational, all-volunteer and will respond to any service chaplain of any faith who asks for help.

"We'll find a way," Henningsen said.

What's in the care packages? Whatever chaplains ask for. Anyone who's been sending packages to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan is familiar with much of the wish list -- beef jerky, power bars, baby wipes, Otter Pops (summer), hot chocolate (winter), coffee, lotions, lip balm, eye-glass cleaner, contact cleaners, feminine products, music, toiletries, games, school supplies, stuffed animals and Beanie babies for local children.

Henningsen said chaplains sometimes don't ask for themselves, so he tries to find out through wives or families what the chaplain might need. In one chaplain's case his group sent a black shower curtain to serve as a door to his primitive quarters in Afghanistan, providing some minimal privacy for counseling and conversation.

Henningsen said that as far as he knows, Trinity Presbyterian is the only church in Alaska in the program, and they'd love to have company. Any church, group or individual wanting to help can call him at 333-4205.

-- Frank Gerjevic

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