I believe in a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye and a life for a life.

I believe that the brutal murderer of Mark McKenzie, Brenda Groene and her sons, Slade and Dylan, should die for his crimes. In fact, this might be one villain that I could execute myself.

The enormity of this man’s crimes screams for the death penalty.

Yet I advocated in an editorial on these pages that Kootenai County Prosecutor Bill Douglas should accept a plea bargain that would preserve the life of Groene family murder suspect Joseph Edward Duncan III, if found guilty. Why? Because the capital punishment system is broken. The death blow is meted out haphazardly to killers, many years after their crimes, if at all. One is injected. Another slips through a legal crack. Charles Manson remains alive despite the “Helter Skelter” murders because he was fortunate enough to be on death row when capital punishment was banned for a decade.

I believe in the death penalty for premeditated, first-degree murder. However, I don’t believe in our current legal system when it comes to handling these cases. Anti-capital punishment attorneys have become so adept at appealing death penalty cases that executions have become cost prohibitive. A county faces a higher price tag to prosecute and defend a death sentence on appeal than it does to ship a killer to prison for life.

It would still be worth the million bucks or so to see the Groene family killer prosecuted and sentenced to die, if …

“Anyone could guarantee that he would be put to death in a decade.

“It would bring peace to the Groene family.

“Kidnap survivor Shasta Groene would be spared from living under his shadow for the rest of her life.

No one can look into a crystal ball today and say whether these things would occur – or whether the death penalty will exist in this country in a decade.

Idaho has put only one murderer to death since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty.

In Washington state, the death penalty is hanging by a thread after the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a triple-murderer can’t escape death row simply because the Green River Killer had done so. Dayva Cross, 46, didn’t think it was fair that he should be executed for three murders when Gary Ridgway killed dozens and then plea-bargained his way to a life sentence. The proportionality defense swayed Justice Charles Johnson, who wrote in the minority opinion that the sentences handed to Ridgway and other mass killers “reveals a staggering flaw in the system of administration of the death penalty in Washington.”

Elsewhere, state and court officials fret that lackluster defense has landed innocent people on death row.

I’d love to see the Groene family killer dispatched in the same way that he murdered, tied up with a hammer blow to the head. I’d love to see this pathological monster suffer as the Groenes have. But the legal system that has protected him for so long has fractured to the point that it’s ineffective, for punishment or justice. The best society can hope for is that the burden of life without possibility of parole shortens his miserable life.

Then, God help him when he meets his maker without a hand-wringing advocate at his side.