The state of Texas is likely finding this to be a great time to put a halt on executions, as it needs to reexamine its own processes for killing killers. The Harris County Crime Lab has been in the news regularly for serious problems, and the state is now investigating hundreds of cases handled by the lab, including several in which the accused have already been executed.

It appalls me that anyone may find reason to justify the possibility that my home state has murdered fifteen innocent people. These investigations have already exhonerated several accused sex offenders, some of whom have spent decades in Texas prisons. It is my hope that this is the final farewell for the death penalty here.

The debate over the mix of drugs, for me, is a waste of time. I understand that death penalty opponents see this as a step toward the larger goal of ending executions. But as long as we are killing people, the intensity of their suffering seems at least partially irrelevent. Our notions of what "cruel and unusual" means have changed over the generations, but at the end of it all, we're still killing people, and being killed is probably not pleasant, regardless of the method.

The best reason to end the death penalty is the fact that the judicial system is a system designed and employed by human beings, and humans are capable of error. As another poster succinctly put it, we tend to be cynical about the government's ability to do anything right, and when it comes to tort reform, we express outrage when a jury awards multi-million dollar judgments for petty lawsuits. Yet how can we justify giving this egregiously inept government and these preposterous juries the power to kill?

If someone murdered someone I love, I could conceptualize the satisfaction of knowing that murderer will be killed, too. That's my emotional investment in this issue: people want justice, and we want justice that is preportional to the crime. But it seems to me that the side most dependent on emotional appeals in this debate are the supporters of the death penalty. They aren't thinking rationally on this. It's time to end the death penalty once and for all.

Excellent post, Anse.

I live in Oklahoma, home to the three drug cocktail and also home to death penalty related scandals. I encourage all those that continue to support the death penalty to learn about Joyce Gilchrist, a former Oklahoma City police chemist that helped send dozens to death row (11 of whom have already been executed) and hundreds more to long prison sentences. It was later proven that she falsified evidence on numerous occasions.

Oklahoma also lays claim to the infamous case of Ron Williamson and Dennis Fritz, memorialized in The Innocent Man.

I think the argument that boils down to "how many innocents are we willing to kill to keep the death penalty" is a bit overblown. First, not all of the innocents are truly innocent, in that perhaps objectively their crime deserves a lesser punishment but through the litigation process the evidence convinced a jury of capital punishment. And there are instances where innocent people willingly take responsibility for heinous crimes in order to protect someone else or to earn some cheap fame. We'll never get rid of those.

In reality, Americans are willing to put up with some error in capital punishment. Just as Anse and spruce think that the benefits of capital punishment are questionable, the same could be said for smoking and alcohol -- two things that contribute to innocent deaths and yet are tolerated by society. The argument that just one innocent life taken by capital punishment is too many is a loser. That's why I go with the argument that life in prison is a harsher sentence than the death penalty.

Still, the death penalty does not offend me, nor is it unconstitutional. It's just not the best policy choice overall.

In reality, Americans are willing to put up with some error in capital punishment.

That doesn't trouble you? You have no problem at all with this? That's frightening, isn't it? Because of all the mistakes we could make as a country, this is one mistake that cannot in any way be amended. You can't make a murder right.

Right now, people like yourself have more of an emotional investment in capital punishment than anything resembling reason. You need to see people die for their crimes, even if it means innocent people could possibly die in the process. This goes beyond any rational concept of justice; you've crossed into that highly irrational, highly emotional need to see the maximum punishment.

But what is unclear to me is how ending capital punishment is an injustice. How is it wrong? You can't successfully argue that ending executions results in more murders. The correlations thrown about do not in any way show a cause-and-effect relationship. There is at least as much "evidence" to suggest that crime is related to poverty, and I don't expect you to agree with that.

I think you're confused about Sycamancy's position. S/he claimed to be opposed to capital punishment, but not because s/he buys the argument that executing innocents is unacceptable. I too find Sycomancy's lack of discomfort with the killing of innocents disturbing, but you seem to have missed that, in the most basic sense (opposing the death penalty), s/he is on your side.

Actually, I do find the execution of innocents to be disturbing -- note how I said that Americans are willing to put up with some error, not Sycamancy. There is a difference, there.

What I'm noting is that the "one innocent executed is too many" is as flawed as "one innocent killed by terrorism is too many" is. The American people aren't going to buy it as an argument, because fact is that there are plenty of times when the person to be executed is not innocent, is guilty as hell, and is guilty of incredibly awful things. They want that person to be killed because (they think) it's the ultimate penalty available to apply. And it's not as illogical and emotional to want this as you think. Is "eye for an eye" really all that emotional? It's a pretty logical, if rudimentary, yardstick for measuring the magnitude of a just punishment. It dovetails with the "treat others as you would be treated yourself" line of morality -- only here, you will be treated as you have treated others. Is that illogical? Frankly, when it comes down to it, I think "one innocent executed is too many" is far more emotional a stance than "eye for an eye." Which, again, is why I reject it in favor of a more logical approach.

Most capital punishment advocates have moved on from arguing the deterrence angle, and now focus more on the fact that killing a murderer ensures that the murderer will never kill again, whether a fellow inmate or an outsider (should the inmate escape). In the way you ask whether the small chance that an innocent is executed bothers us, they ask whether the small chance that a convicted murderer kills again bothers you. It has happened that people on death row have escaped and killed innocent people before being caught again. What about those lives? Don't we have a duty to make sure that a killer never kills again?

It has happened that people on death row have escaped and killed innocent people before being caught again.

I don't see how convicts who escape death row and kill before being imprisoned again is a very good defense of the death penalty itself. If anything, it just tells me that crimes can be committed whether the convicted are about to die or not.

Secondly, the idea that any convict can escape from prison is a very lousy excuse to support the death penalty. Do you suggest we execute all felons? What about the problem of security in prisons itself? Do we not bother addressing that obvious problem?

If even one person is EVER wrongly executed then it is a monstrous injustice on the part of the state. I would rather see a hundred hardened criminals go free than even one innocent person die in an execution chamber. There is no way to make that right. If we eliminate the death penalty, however, all we've done is eliminate one potential injustice. If any injustice is committed as a result of ending capital punishment, it is a result of some other problem: lack of security in prison, unjustifiable parole, etc. We can make prisons more secure. We can't bring an innocent person back to life.

Anse: "I don't see how convicts who escape death row and kill before being imprisoned again is a very good defense of the death penalty itself."

You don't see that killing a murderer ensures that the murderer can never kill again, and thus would prevent any future violence from that person? You don't think that's a good thing? For someone who complains about innocent people being killed, you only seem concerned if they are killed by the government as opposed to by an already-convicted murderer. Why is that? That makes no sense. It's not like those killed by the escapee can be brought back to life any easier.

I agree that the incidence of death row inmates committing more murders is really low, but so is the incidence of the innocent being given the death penalty. People have escaped from even the most secure prisons. I don't know if it's a wash or if one is more common than the other, but you are wrong to simply discount the danger of keeping psychopaths alive.

Anse: "If even one person is EVER wrongly executed then it is a monstrous injustice on the part of the state."

Yep. And it's a monstrous injustice for innocent people to be killed as collateral damage during wartime, but we don't drop our guns and give up because of it. We do what we can to minimize the losses, if not eliminate them. But we don't let a single life hogtie everything. We don't lock every prisoner in solitary because occasionally one prisoner might kill another one. We don't force police officers to go around unarmed because they might accidentally shoot an innocent bystander. And we don't give up all of our rights because a terrorist might set off a bomb that kills an American.

Face it, yours is the emotional argument here.

I know that live were taken without knowing that they did kill a person. However it's nothing we did . The fact is that the C.S.I are to take the gun . The thing is don't they show if the guy killed someone.