Q:
How can you promote the position that capital punishment should be enforced in this country? Isn’t it going against the conditions of the Torah because the Torah requires two witnesses and so on?
A:
And the answer is the Torah doesn’t require two witnesses for a gentile government. It’s only if Jews wish to put somebody to death they need a certain procedure. But the law of the malchus is justified without two witnesses even for killing Jewish criminals. We don’t say to the government ‘You need two eidim.’ No; a melech, a king or a government, if they find somebody who transgressed their laws – even a Jew – and the evidence is sufficient as far as they’re concerned, they’re not asid liten es hadin. They don’t have to call in a sanhedrin of twenty three judges and judge him according to the procedure of Torah. No.
And certainly for gentile criminals, there’s nothing to talk about. The malchus has the right to put wrongdoers to death.
TAPE # 317 (May 1980)
