Timothy McVeigh's execution today is noteworthy, coming as it does a "mere" six years since the bombing in Oklahoma City and three since he was convicted and sentenced; others like him have been on death row for 10, 12, or even 15 years.

The case itself is noteworthy for another reason: Its failure to provoke the usual outcries against the death penalty, or sympathy for the defendant. The opponents of the death penalty have been unusually quiet about the sentence, and there have been few if any candle-light vigils outside the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., where McVeigh was being held. Most Americans thought that he deserved to die, and the others were hard-pressed to come up with reasons why he shouldn't.

The American Civil Liberties Union, for example, was quick to criticize the FBI in the documents matter, saying that "too often the intentional or unintentional withholding of evidence by law enforcement officials unfairly decides the outcome of capital cases." True, perhaps, but obviously not in this case; McVeigh confessed to the crime.

Nor could the ACLU make the familiar charge about the "poor quality of the legal representation," or say that his defense counsel were drunk or asleep during the trial, or that they were not adequately paid (and, therefore, had no reason to mount a good defense). On the contrary, McVeigh's lawyers mounted the best defense possible, and, as the ACLU admitted, they were well paid for their efforts, getting $10 million of the $50 million the federal government spent on the case.

Nor was there any point in the ACLU saying, as it habitually does, that the death penalty is imposed disproportionately on minorities--McVeigh is not black or Hispanic, and he is obviously not mentally retarded--or that it does not serve to deter the crimes for which it is imposed. That may or may not be true, but, in either case, it is irrelevant here. The death penalty was imposed on McVeigh not for utilitarian reasons but because justice required it, in fact, cried out for it: In cold blood and with malice aforethought, McVeigh had killed 168 innocent men, women and children.

I first addressed the issue of capital punishment some 30 years ago. My business then, as now, did not require me to think about the punishment of criminals in general or the legitimacy or efficacy of capital punishment in particular. In a vague way, I was aware of the disagreement among professionals concerning the purpose of punishment--whether it was intended to deter others, to rehabilitate the criminal, or to pay him back--but like most laymen I had no compelling reason to decide which purpose was right or to what extent they may all have been right.

I did know that retribution was held in ill repute among criminologists and jurists; to them, it was simply a fancy name for revenge, and that revenge was barbaric. I also knew that capital punishment had the support mostly of policemen, prison guards, and some local politicians, the sort of people Arthur Koestler called "hanghards," and that the intellectual community denounced it as both unnecessary and immoral.

It was the phenomenon of Simon Wiesenthal that allowed me to understand that the intellectuals were wrong and that the police, the politicians, and the majority of the American people were right. We punish criminals mostly to pay them back, and we execute the worst of them out of moral necessity. Anyone who respects Wiesenthal's mission, I wrote, will be driven to the same conclusion.

Of course, not everyone will respect that mission; some will think it bizarre. Why should anyone devote his life--more than 30 years of it!--exclusively to the task of hunting down the Nazi criminals who survived World War II and escaped punishment? Wiesenthal said his conscience forced him "to bring the guilty ones to trial." But why punish them? What do we hope to accomplish by punishing the likes of SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Adolf Eichmann? We surely do not expect to rehabilitate them, and it would be foolish to think that, by punishing them, others will be deterred from doing what they did.

The answer, I think is clear: We want to punish them, McVeigh as well as the likes of Eichmann, in order to pay them back, and the only appropriate way to pay them back is to take their lives, publicly and with all the solemnity of the law, for they have violated the most solemn of the laws.

Those related to the victims of McVeigh's crimes will appreciate this argument; but not all of them. In fact, one of them repeated the ACLU argument that killing begets nothing so much as more killing, and that the time has come to "put an end of this cycle of violence." A familiar phrase, this, and made so in our time as a prescription for solving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

But it is a pernicious argument; those who make it treat the factors in the equation as equal, equally reprehensible, wicked, or forbidden, as if there is nothing to choose between McVeigh and his executioner. They should go back to the Bible they sometimes quote, specifically to Exodus 20:13, which reads not, as they would have it, "Thou shalt not kill," but rather, and the difference is decisive, "Thou shalt not murder."

Timothy McVeigh, like Adolf Eichmann, was a murderer, and I can think of no reason why he should not have been made to pay for his crimes with his life.

Walter Berns is a resident scholar at AEI.