To appreciate Reiman's point about justice and the death penalty, it is probably helpful to separate various independent 'decisions about desserts' that can be made on the way to deciding whether or not a person should be executed.

a. If a person breaks a law, a person deserves to be punished in the sense that he has done something that has brought the punishment on himself. The harm that the punishment delvers to the violater is not gratuitous, or arbitrary. This is not to say that the final decision should be to punish the person; more needs to be taken into consideration.

 b. If a person breaks a law that is intended to reflect/maintain the equality of persons (or if the person violates an informal principle that 'governs' toward the same end), the person deserves to be punished in the sense that she has created an imbalance in the scales of justice. She has violated the sovereignty of another person and so has brought on the punishment (the means) necessary to re-establish the relative equality of the person involved. Here again, this is not to say that the final decision should be to punish the person. It is just to say that if the person is punished, it will not be the gratuitous infliction of pointless suffering.

c. One may consider possible mitigating circumstances, such as the fairness with which the particular punishment is applied. That is, one may give consideration to the sorts of points that Nathanson raises in the essay "Does it Matter if the Death Penalty is Arbitrarily Administered?". If the death penalty is not given in a non-arbitrary way, then one might maintain that this person should not be executed. We might put this in the following way-- even though the person deserves to die, according to the dictates of a. and b., the person should nevertheless not be exectued, because it would be unfair (unjust) to execute him while others equally guilty are ot being executed. One might maintain that, in the final analysis, this person does not deserve to die, because he has been a victim of an arbitrarily applied penalty. This is so, even though he deserves to die in the senses of a and b.

    One could also allow that, in certain cases, the possibility of mercy or forgiveness should be given consideration. The issue of whether or not such factors, as well as others, should be taken into consideration does not obstruct Reiman's point about the relation between equality and the demands of justice. On the contrary, these considerations seem to presuppose Reiman's justice considerations. If there has been no violation, there is nothing to forgive, no occasion on which mercy amy or may not be appropriate. One cannot forgive someone if they haven't done anything, nor can one be merciful to someone, if that someone doesn't desrve to be punished.

    One can, to be sure, perpetrate a gross injustice by punishing a person who doesn't deserve to be punished because they haven;t done anything.  But, it is not an act of mercy to refrain from punishing someone who (one knows) is not guilty of anything.

    If one is thinking in terms of the demands of justice in a final analysis, rather than in terms the demands of justice in a preliminary assessment on the way to a final analysis, one may not give Reiman's arguments consideration at the right point.

    Reiman, himself, allows for final assessments that have as an outcome "this person should not be executed, even though by b, this person deserves to die." This is his point in the second section of his essay. This is how he can think that there is a sense in which a person deserves to die-- that justice requires it-- and at the same time think that the death penalty should be abandoned. He thinks that the demands of 'pure justice' are not the only considerations that should weigh when punishment is considered.