Does the scumbag who gunned down Officer Gary Skerski deserve to die? Definitely. In fact, the dirtbag deserves to endure the ancient Roman punishment of being bound up in a sack with a monkey, a snake and a dog then tossed into the Tiber. Although it would be cruel to the animals to place them in such close proximity to such a vile human being, considering the nature of the crime, I'm certain even the most hardcore PETA supporter would be OK with this.

But should the two-legged cockroach who robbed Gary Skerski of his life be put to death? Should the state of Pennsylvania (or any other state in America, for that matter) enact the death penalty?

Definitely not, for the simple reason that executing Gary Skerski's killer will only lead to an increase in Pennsylvania's murder rate.

The statistics don't lie. The murder rate in states without the death penalty has continually remained lower than in states that employ capital punishment. And as the number of people put to death has grown, this divide has expanded. In 1990, the murder rates in states with and without the death penalty differed by 4 percent. By 2004, you stood a 42 percent higher chance of getting murdered in a death penalty state than in a state without capital punishment. Of the 20 states with the highest murder rates today, 18 have the death penalty.

So why doesn't the death penalty act as a deterrent against murder? Simply because murders fall into two categories: crimes of passion and premeditated killings.

Except in crappy sci-fi films based on Philip K. Dick stories and starring sofa-leaping Scientologists, it's impossible to prevent crimes of passion. As for premeditated crimes, well, the individuals who commit these crimes tend to consider themselves too smart to get caught—otherwise they wouldn't be out there pulling that drive-by shooting at two in the afternoon in front of a local news crew and then bragging about it on their MySpace pages, now would they?

Maybe this is why most Western democracies have abolished capital punishment. By continuing to hang on to the barbaric practice, the United States and Pennsylvania find themselves in the company of such truly enlightened countries as China (home of the student crushing tanks), Saudi Arabia (native soil to 14 of the 19 Sept. 11 hijackers) and Iran (where a wife-beater is more than a T-shirt: it's a career choice.*)

Need I even get into how poor people get to "ride the lighting" more than rich people (90 percent of the people on death row couldn't afford to hire a lawyer), and how blacks are more likely to be sentenced to death than whites? What about how we've devolved to the point where we're executing the mentally retarded?

As for those who use Biblical lessons and the Code of Hammurabi's "eye for an eye" declaration to justify executions? Those who would remind us that the Bible instructs us to seek a life for a life would do well to remember that the Good Book also prescribes the death penalty for such infractions as premarital sex (Deuteronomy 20:20-22) and fortune telling (Leviticus 20:27).

We're better than the sewer flotsam who murdered Officer Skerski: We can control our blood lust. Would we all love to drag the murdering coward down to the shores of the Delaware River with a sack full of wildlife in tow? Hell yeah. But what would that leave us with?

Eventually it would only lead to more and more executions and fewer and fewer good men like Gary Skerski.

Rodney Anonymous is a founding member of the Dead Milkmen, and our "Aid or Invade" columnist.

*I base this statement not on any factual information but entirely on repeated late-night viewings of Not Without My Daughter, starring Sally Fields as a woman whose Iranian husband slaps her around roughly every seven minutes or so. It's a staple of the Lifetime Network.