With the beginning of the state of Iowa’s legislative assembly over the past few weeks, a number of bills have been introduced and even more ideas have been floated. One of the more eye-catching ideas has been the introduction of a bill by Republican Sen. Kent Sorenson to reintroduce capital punishment for some crimes.

As with most legislation, there is an important backstory with this proposal. In July, two Iowa girls, aged eight and 10 years old, went missing. Months passed, and they were found dead in December. Additionally, there are other haunting cases of missing and murdered children whose parents support Sorenson’s proposal.

The death penalty is always a serious issue. It always garners extensive public debate that everyone contributes to, from governors, representatives and senators to families at their dinner tables and preachers in their pulpits. In 1965, the state of Iowa repealed laws prescribing the death penalty. Thirty years later, the Iowa Senate rejected a measure to reintroduce it by a 39-11 vote.

The year 2013 is different from 1965, and almost as different from 1995. Different times require different laws and, with the passage of time and development of technologies that make it more certain than ever whether a person did or did not commit a crime, the issues that govern the debate on this bill and issue should not be those that governed our conduct in years past. Every generation must make its own laws, and every generation must have its debate on them. To refuse to have the debate at all would be to stifle the political process.

One of the most morbid announcements of Sorenson’s proposal was a post on TheBeanWalker.com, Iowa’s equivalent of the Drudge Report, which is a news aggregate with a more or less conservative slant. There, with a link to a news story about Sorenson’s proposal, was a photo of him sitting, glaring into the camera, with the words, “Give me death.”

That pronouncement is an oversimplification of the issue.

A policy as life-changing as the death penalty, which might provide closure for the anguished family of a victim and which certainly extinguishes the life of the criminal, must be debated honestly and fully.

Iowa’s representatives and senators must concentrate their attention, mental faculties and cooperation skills on a whole host of issues related to capital punishment that might appear at first glance as tangential but which relate to it in a very real way. The issue is not just whether certain crimes deserve capital punishment. We have to consider what method of execution we mandate. We have to consider how long we allow the appeals process to drag on. We have to consider the qualifications — competence and ethics alike — of the prosecuting attorneys directing the case. And perhaps most importantly, we have to consider the rules and standards of evidence used in trials where capital punishment is a possibility. A jury’s certainty should be as final as the sentence the judge is allowed to assign.

Iowans will lose nothing by having a debate which resolves all these issues before a law goes into effect. Haste makes waste — in this case, a waste of lives.