Retaliation?  Too often, people, particularly those who follow religious convictions, mistake retaliation for justice.  They suppose that if a person is justly convicted of a crime, justice demands that society, in some way, retaliate so as to "compensate" this person, as well as society, for his or her crime.
     However, as French author Albert Camus, perhaps most famous for his novels The Stranger and The Plague, wrote in his 1957 essay "Reflections on the Guillotine," retaliation is "pure impulse," an inclination or tendency that, as he sees it, has been ingrained in humanity from its very beginnings.  It's primal, a natural and therefore, as he sees it, unconsidered and instinctual urge, to strike back at one's fellow human being.  It has nothing to do with the rule of law.
     That's Camus's point.  Law, he goes on to say, "cannot obey" the same rules as nature. Law must elevate the character of human response to crime beyond mere primordial impulse.  It must set out a new path for how people view societal wrongdoing.  Law must change the tenor of the conversation.
     As many commentators have remarked, the ideal government is one of laws, not "men" (or women!).  If we are to construct our respective societies on the basis of law, we should understand that law is designed to improve us, not allow us to fall prey to our basest predilections.  Justice is the art of seeking betterment as well as redress.  We cannot separate the two if we hope to structure a just society.
     It all comes down to the heart.  What is in our heart when we are responding to those who have been justly (and this is a problematic word) convicted of crime?  Are we thinking of God's love and belief in human good, made as he or she is in God's image, or are we giving into everything which drags us further into our long since vanished primordial chaos (Genesis 1:2) and slime?