The death penalty was eliminated in Maine in 1886. Maine now has one of the two or three lowest murder rates in the United States.

I believe that this is true because in Maine we have a culture that does not see force as an appropriate way to settle differences. Such cultures are likely to have a low level of violence and to oppose the death penalty. The 60 percent of all Americans who want Dzhokhar Tsarnaev executed for the Boston Marathon bombings can learn from us.

Massachusetts has already learned our lesson. A recent Boston Globe poll found that only 15 percent of Boston residents want Mr. Tsarnaev executed and, statewide in Massachusetts, only 19 percent.

These figures dramatically show the bias in the jury selection process used in the Tsarnaev trial.

For this trial, the jury had to be “death-qualified”: meaning, in effect, that it had to be chosen from the one-seventh of the local population who, when asked, said that they were willing to kill Mr. Tsarnaev.

Research has shown that death-qualified jurors are much more sympathetic to prosecution arguments than death penalty opponents and much less inclined to give the defense a fair hearing.

Death-qualified jurors are more likely to have authoritarian views and to feel that obedience to the government outweighs the rights of the individual.

Death-qualified jurors, when compared to others, are not as able to draw appropriate conclusions from flawed science, and death-qualified jurors are more likely to be racist, sexist and homophobic.

Jurors in non-capital cases are prohibited from hearing about post-conviction penalties because exposure to this information may be prejudicial.

Why is this not seen as prejudicial when the defendant’s life is at stake? And what does the existence of death-qualified juries say about the integrity of our judicial system?

Meredith N. Springer

Scarborough