My top reason for opposing the death penalty

As an advisory board member for Oregonians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (OADP.org), I was asked to highlight my most important reason to oppose the death penalty. Here is my response:

"A system committed to having a death penalty is a system that forces the state to pretend to have attained a standard of perfection and fairness that is absurdly far from the reality of the legal system in America today. Thus, having death in the system freezes everything because, if our system is so good today that it can be just to kill people with it, then it needs no improvement--and, in fact, all improvements in procedure and research into sources of error only call into question the claim to existing perfection, and thus the moral claim for the existing death sentences and past executions. And that means that having death locks us into a terribly flawed system that actively resists evidence of systematic errors and necessary improvements. And it turns what should be a quest for justice into a war to justify the status quo against all evidence of its many failings."