Editorial: Death penalty moratorium is positive step, but not enough

Alabama’s Senate Judiciary Committee voted 6-1 Wednesday for a bill that places a three-year moratorium on executions. What this does is ensure that the punishment is administered “fairly and impartially.”

Obviously, we do not need capital punishment that is anything but fair.

But this brings us to the question, is capital punishment fair to begin with? All too often, the wrong person is convicted of murder and sits on death row.

According to the latest count from the Death Penalty Information Center, 130 people have been convicted, sentenced to die and then released from death row with evidence of their innocence. Of those 130, five have been in Alabama. How many more were innocent and put to death?

The stakes are too high for mistakes to be made or prejudice, power or personal incomes to play a role.

Not everyone can hire a “Dream Team” like O.J. Simpson. Simpson walked free with the preponderance of evidence against him. Others have been sent to their death with much less evidence against them.

While the American criminal justice system may very well be the best system in the history of the world, it is, like all other man-made and human-operated instruments, far from perfect.

Yet we, as a nation continue to kill in the name of justice, something that is extremely rare among industrialized nations. One thing we share with Iran is a willingness of our governments to kill criminal citizens.

There are lots of arguments both pro and con. Some rest on religious beliefs. Others are based upon the simple yet powerful desire for revenge against society’s worst.

All of those same arguments have been debated ad nauseum. But before you cheer on the death penalty, ask yourself: Do you trust your government to pave the right roads, tax equitably, balance the budget or always do the right thing? How can you trust your government to kill the right people?

We make lethal injection the method of execution because we believe it’s more clinical and seemingly less violent.

It is easier for us to accept and still think of the act as civilized. Each time a new method of death is introduced, the courts go through the same exercises of determining whether this method or that method is cruel and unusual according to strict legal definitions.

The issue isn’t whether the method is cruel and unusual. The issue is how many men and women will be killed wrongfully, or needlessly, when life without parole would be just as good at protecting society.

For countless monsters, the argument can truly be made for the death sentence. There have been scores of horrible people that have done horrible things. But what are we seeking other than vengeance by eliminating that life? And doesn’t that put us, as a society, down on their level?