Death penalty is never justified

It remains one of the great paradoxes. We empower the government with life and death yet remain wary of government's awesome power over far lesser matters.

We readily criticize every unfilled pothole and reluctantly pay taxes, wondering how much is ill-spent. Outrage follows governmental intrusions on our privacy. It is our right to question government. History and bitter experience proves that even good governments make mistakes and make them all the time. Simply put, bureaucracies go astray. We love our country, but we know it to be fallible. Only the Creator is perfect.

Yet we allow the state to hand out death sentences in our name, even though we know that we repeatedly get it wrong, that innocent people are convicted and put to death. We exercise god-like powers without god-like skills. We do that which we know not, blindly trusting the admittedly unreliable.

Neither religion nor secular morality demands capital punishment. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints "regards the question of whether and in what circumstances the state should impose capital punishment as a matter to be decided solely by the prescribed processes of civil law. We neither promote nor oppose capital punishment." Similarly, the recently departed Pope John Paul II prayed, "May the death penalty, an unworthy punishment still used in some countries, be abolished throughout the world."

If religion does not require capital punishment are there secular grounds? Not even secular arguments can justify the finality and irrevocability of state execution.

We have exonerated 119 persons since the modern American death penalty began in 1976. These are people, who, despite being convicted before a jury, were wrongfully convicted and were in fact innocent of any crime. Many languished for years on death row; some came within hours of execution. They are innocent people with names and families — such as Gary Gauger, Walter McMillian, Rolando Cruz, Anthony Porter and, most recently this year, Derrick Jamison. Most of death row's innocents were freed in spite of a judicial system that resisted all the way, eager to bury its errors.

Blind luck separates those who live from those who die. That we are executing the innocent along with the guilty is as certain as anything can be in this life. And because we have already executed someone — the wrong someone — we are not even looking for the real perpetrator who could kill again. With life imprisonment we can find and partially rectify the mistake, but death is final, irrevocable and irremediable. It is the ultimate mistake, the arrogant assumption by a fallible state of god-like power over human life.