By DAVE HAMRICK
Editor-at-large

Death penalty opponents have gathered considerable ammunition in recent years as numerous convicts have later turned out to be innocent.

One state has enacted a moratorium on executions following two well-publicized incidents of having the wrong man on death row surfaced. One poor chap had his conviction overturned just hours before he was to die for someone else's crime.

I've always been a death penalty advocate, for two reasons:

1. Despite arguments and skewed statistics to the contrary, I believe a death penalty promptly and properly administered would make criminals think twice about whether to kill their victims to “eliminate witnesses.” The fact that such a deterrent seems not to exist is attributable more to the rarity of executions and the length of time between crime and punishment than to any lack of deterrent factor.

2. Even if the death penalty doesn't deter future criminals from committing murder, it certainly deters the person executed from committing any more.

Still, the number of false convictions does give one pause.

As a longtime observer of the law enforcement process, I'm not so naive as to believe that they always get their man. Sometimes they get the wrong man.

There is a natural tendency among law enforcers to form an opinion about who is guilty, and then ignore all evidence to the contrary, especially in high-profile, high-pressure cases in which the public is demanding a head on a platter... anybody's head.

A wife disappears and the husband is automatically the number one suspect. Some people are a bit eccentric, or belligerent, or shy. Once a husband is a suspect, any personality quirk is interpreted as evidence of guilt.

“We know who did it... we just can't prove it yet.” How many times have you heard that one?

If you can't prove it, you don't know.

So, should we throw out the death penalty because the justice system is fallible?

Not in my opinion. But we certainly need a complete overhaul of the entire process of putting people on death row. And if we don't get that, I feel certain we eventually will do away with the death penalty, and that will be a shame.

We should reserve the death penalty, not for the most heinous of crimes, but for those in which the evidence is the most ironclad.

All murder is heinous. If there is torture or rape, all the more so.

Funny how we tend to coddle the professional killer, as if for some reason the fact that he kills purely for business reasons — it's nothing personal — makes his crime less horrific for the victim. If a person can kill another in cold blood, then that person should not live.

But if there is the slightest reason to doubt, then life in prison should be the penalty, not death.

Juries should not make that decision, because they're too easily swayed by emotion. Judges, perhaps a panel of three, should weigh the quality of the evidence and decide the sentence based on carefully written criteria designed to eliminate any possibility of executing the wrong person.

I'm well aware of the arguments that humanity is debased by the death penalty, and that our justice system becomes no better than the killers it executes.

Emotionally, I'm even drawn to such an argument.

But on the other hand, a society is further debased, in my opinion, if it suffers cold-blooded killers to live.

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