An open response to Michael Smerconish's May 23 OpEd column ("Life, death - and Shannon Schieber's killer"):

DEAR MR. Smerconish,

We are Shannon Schieber's parents. Your column in the form of an open letter made it clear that you want to see our daughter's murderer put to death for his crimes. We oppose that on at least three grounds.

First, we were raised as Catholics and remain active. The fundamental tenets on which our religion is based have endured for 2,000 years and have been embraced by millions of people. The bases of all Christian religions are the two simple laws Christ gave us: that people love God above all else, and their neighbors as themselves. The prayer he gave us is the Lord's prayer, where we ask God to "forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us."

Christianity and other religions hold life to be sacred. We embraced these principles long before Shannon was murdered. Our concerns about the death penalty generally or in regard to this case are not about our own miserable situation. They are about the appropriateness of the death penalty given what we believe.

Under the circumstances of our daughter's death, our beliefs about appropriate punishment have been severely tested. But we have no choice but to adhere to our principles. We know that Shannon would expect no less of us.

You ask how we would feel if the officers responding to Shannon's call for help had broken down her door and killed her assailant during the attack. People committing dangerous acts that imperil others must be neutralized. In the immediate moment of one person attacking another unjustly, force may be the only way to subdue an assailant. In some instances, this will result in the assailant's death.

But in a controlled environment, the circumstances are not the same. Incarceration of dangerous people can generally protect society from them. We are pleased that Shannon's murderer has been apprehended and believe he should never walk the face of the earth as a free man again.

You also raise the issue that if the court were to follow our wishes, then the death penalty might be applied on an uneven basis. We already believe the death penalty is often applied in discriminatory and arbitrary ways in our society.

For example, in our home state of Maryland, use of the death penalty was recently suspended for just this reason. Nine of 13 current death-row inmates come from a single county in Maryland, one with a relatively low murder rate. While understanding what death-sentence statistics truly reflect is often difficult, all but one of the 13 men on death row in Maryland were sent there for killing a white person, even though 80 percent of the homicide victims in our state are black.

Other states are also investigating inequities in how they apply the death penalty, including Connecticut and Indiana. Recent studies in Illinois, New Jersey and North Carolina have raised questions about the equitable application of the death penalty in those states.

Philadelphia's use of the death penalty was reviewed in the Cornell Law Review in September 1998. The authors noted that, in the city, "the average black defendant's probability of receiving a death sentence is 1.6 times greater than a similarly situated nonblack defendant." The empirical evidence from Philadelphia and New Jersey leads the authors to conclude "that the problem of arbitrariness and discrimination in the administration of the death penalty is a matter of continuing concern and is not confined to southern jurisdictions."

The issue of victim's rights that you raise is one that we are particularly sensitive to, given what we have endured. You claim that the other victims and society's interests should outweigh ours. In the cases of the other 13 victims attributed to Troy Graves, not one was murdered.

Neither Colorado nor Pennsylvania prescribes the death penalty for sexual assaults unless they involve murder. Shannon's case is the only one that could result in such a sentence. We deserve special consideration here. We can document that it happens elsewhere.

Philadelphia as a society was threatened in the series of attacks by the Center City Rapist, but only Shannon - as far as we know - lost her life. Your suggestion that imposing the death penalty on Troy Graves for Shannon's murder would deter other criminal activity is tenuous at best. Putting Shannon's murderer away for the rest of his living days will protect society from him.

If you truly mean that "we never want another promising young woman to have her life cut short by a murderous thug," there are far more effective things the citizens of Philadelphia could demand than the execution of Troy Graves.

In August 1997, the police department's Sex Crime Unit linked the first four Center City attacks. While the senior officers in Sex Crimes identified the cases as a set of serial sexual assaults, the unit had classified two of the cases as non-crimes because of the systematic effort to keep such cases from showing up on the city's crime statistics. There is evidence that Sex Crimes did not bring this information to the attention of the district commander who oversaw the neighborhood where these attacks took place.

There is absolutely no evidence that anyone in the police department warned the Center City community in the fall of 1997 that a serial sexual assailant was working their neighborhood. Had the district officers been informed about what was happening, matters might have been handled differently on Sept. 9, 1997. That was when Troy Graves was taken into custody in the early morning on a "peeping Tom" complaint in that neighborhood.

If the district police had been aware of what Sex Crimes knew when they had Troy Graves in their grasp, he might have been more carefully checked out against what had been happening in the neighborhood. We now know his description was virtually identical to that given to police by the victims. We also know his DNA matched that of the assailant in the 1997 Center City cases.

BUT WHAT IS even more important to us - and should be to anyone with a loved one in Philadelphia - is that the failure to inform the community about what was happening in the area set Shannon up for her ultimate fate.

She was followed by a man fitting Troy Graves' description as she walked home from a movie just two nights before she was killed. Had she known that a serial rapist was working her neighborhood, she would have been far more concerned about this incident than she was. She would likely have called police.

There is also strong reason to believe that other witnesses to her being stalked that night would have called police, too. Shannon almost certainly would have taken more precautions against the predator who would attack her two nights later.

Mr. Smerconish, if you want a safer community, you should demand some accountability from police regarding their handling the cases linked to the Center City Rapist. You should also demand changes in how they handle cases of this sort in the future.

That will net much more deterrence of criminals and a lot more safety than killing Troy Graves could possibly provide.

Sincerely,

Vicki A. and Sylvester J. Schieber