You may feel a slight stinging or shocking sensation...

I arrived at my position on the death penalty through a process that involved the application of morality and moral principles, personal reflection and a rational examination of facts and statistics. How many conservatives can claim that I wonder? In the end, all of these considerations led me to strongly oppose capital punishment.

Morally, I do not believe that we as human beings have the right to "play God" and take a human life - especially since our human judgments are fallible and often wrong. Indeed, since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, 700 men and women on death row have been executed, three-quarters of those executions taking place since 1992.

Since 1976, more than 100 people have been released from prison after being sentenced to death despite their innocence. That translates into one death row inmate being found innocent for every seven executed. Given this track record, how can anyone support the death penalty? We know that it will, inescapably, be wrongly applied and innocent people will be put to death.

All the evidence suggests that the death penalty is no deterrent to crime. In those states that kill convicts, the average murder rate per 100,000 people is 8, while in states that have abolished the death penalty, the murder rate is just 4.4. In other words, states that do not have capital punishment have lower murder rates than states that do. Rather than decreasing murder, capital punishment has a brutalizing effect on society, contributing to an increase in murder.

Evidence shows that the application of the death penalty is both racially and economically biased. Black defendants are far more likely to receive death sentences than others who committed similar crimes. 42% of inmates on death row today are black, even though they comprise only 13% of the U.S. population; 180 blacks have been executed in cases involving white victims, while only 12 whites have been executed in cases with black victims. Of all the people on death row today, 75% of them are non-white. Moreover, a full 98% of all defendants sentenced to death have been people who could not afford their own attorneys. A society should not support a policy that is so unfairly and unevenly applied.

America is one of the last nations in the world to still practice the death penalty. For each year since 1976, two additional countries have abolished capital punishment and the overwhelming majority of nations around the world have now put an end to it in law or practice. In the United States, opposition to the death penalty has doubled since 1994. Recent polls say that 64% of Americans support a moratorium on all executions.

Also, for the “fiscally responsible” of you out there, the execution of prisoners is as much as 10 times as expensive for government as life imprisonment without parole. The conservative ideologues propose ending or limiting appeals to cut the cost on the state. With the number of innocent people currently being executed in the nation, how can a moral and just society cut short appeals of those sentenced to death? The only prudent way to cut the costs incurred by execution is by banning execution of criminals outright.

Capital Punishment must be abolished from our criminal justice system. Now I’m just waiting for the same ideologues I mentioned earlier to scream that I’m “soft on crime.” I believe that criminals who take innocent life or commit other horrific crimes should pay a severe penalty, and that we have a duty to protect our society from danger. Life imprisonment without the possibility of parole is an acceptable and moral alternative for the worst and most violent offenders in our society.

When we have an alternative to killing fellow Americans, how can we not move in that direction? Abolishing the death penalty is our social and moral obligation to the future of the United States.

BTW: I’m also fairly convinced capital punishment violates the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.