When George Ryan, the governor of Illinois, recently declared a moratorium on executions, it marked the first time any state had taken such a dramatic step. There was ample reason for his unprecedented action. Since 1977 when the death penalty was reinstated, Illinois has executed 12 death row inmates, but in the same period it also cleared 13 men awaiting execution. The governor's action has touched off a long-overdue national debate about the use and abuse of the death penalty.  However, Governor Ryan defined the problem narrowly as a flawed legal procedure; he re-affirmed his belief in the death penalty and promised to resume executions once the problems with the legal process have been solved. "Until I can be sure that everyone sentenced to death in Illinois is truly guilty, until I can be sure with moral certainty that no innocent man or woman is facing a lethal injection, no one will meet that fate."
     While I admire Governor Ryan's political courage for taking this necessary first step, I believe that the national debate about the death penalty must go beyond the issue of a moratorium on executions to address the permanent abolition of the death penalty. The main reason why the death penalty must be abolished is that the "moral certainty" sought by Governor Ryan is impossible to attain. There is no procedure or set of safeguards that can eliminate wrongful convictions and executions, because there is no way to eliminate human fallibility which results in ignorance (some culpable, some not), self-righteousness,  blind ambition, false pride, venality, and corruption. All of these predictable human faults  were in evidence in the Illinois criminal justice system. Moreover, the death penalty is truly unique in being final and absolutely irreversible; unlike other penalties, death makes a pardon irrelevant and there is no way to make restitution. So, assuming that no one is willing to take innocent lives, we have to abolish the death penalty. This is the only conclusion that a consistent conservative can reach.
     If Governor Ryan truly believes that there is a way to fix the system to eliminate wrongful conviction and execution, then he is not really a conservative. Central to  conservative political philosophy is a realistic and quite pessimistic view of human nature that correctly emphasizes the fact that we human beings have limited powers of reason and self-control, and that we are easily swayed by our passions. Given these limitations in our powers, it is not surprising that we are quite fallible. We are prone to selfishness, greed, ambition, and love of power. In addition, not a few of us are downright cruel and sadistic. Our limited powers and fallibility are more or less permanent defects whose effects can be mitigated to some degree, but not totally eliminated. 
     It is especially important to keep in mind that the conservative pessimism about human nature is egalitarian; it includes all human beings, regardless of their social standing, class, race, sex, or religion. Consequently, conservative political philosophy is distrustful of those who wield the power of government, believing that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It emphasizes  the need for constitutional checks and balances to curb the use of  political power, and it subscribes to the principle that government which governs least governs best. Moreover, it jealously guards the protections afforded individual life and liberty by the Bill of Rights. And most importantly (for my purposes), conservative pessimism makes no exception for public officials charged with administering criminal justice: police, prosecutors, and judges. 
     Conservative pessimism was given a stunning confirmation by the operation of the Illinois criminal justice system which routinely involved bias, error, and incompetence. For example, the questionable testimony of jailhouse informants was used in at least 46 death penalty cases, and 33 death row inmates were represented by an attorney who had been disbarred or suspended. Moreover, while Illinois is perhaps an extreme example, there is plenty of evidence that it is far from being an aberration. At least six other states considered a moratorium last year, although none adopted one. Nebraska came the closest when the legislature approved a moratorium which was vetoed by the governor. President Clinton has now called for a review of federal capital cases. All of this comes a quarter of a century after death-penalty states adopted the reforms mandated by the U.S. Supreme 
Court, so-called "super due-process," safeguards which were supposed to eliminate error and bias at the state level.
     The current crisis did not come out of the blue. Criminologists and other students of the death penalty have been warning for years that our criminal justice system routinely convicts innocent people charged with capital offenses. In a 1992 book, In Spite of Innocence, sociologist Michael Radelet, philosopher Hugo Bedau, and a writer, Constance E. Putnam, present over 400 "wrong person" cases for which there is convincing evidence that people were arrested for murders they did not commit, 150 or so of them actually ending up on death row. Of these, 23 were executed before they could be exonerated. In the remaining cases, the state admitted errors and corrected them. In its November 9,1998 issue, The U.S. News and World Report cited the fact that "for every 7 executions - 486 since 1976 - 1 other prisoner on death row has been found innocent." 
     The most dramatic evidence that the criminal justice system routinely convicts and punishes innocent people comes from DNA testing. Since DNA testing was introduced in the late 1980's, 63 people in the United States have been exonerated through DNA testing of their evidence and set free, a dozen of them on death row. 
     There are a number of explanations why innocent people are convicted, none of them flattering to human nature. All too often innocent people are intentionally and knowingly convicted by prosecutors. Writing in The Atlantic Monthly (November, 1999 issue), Alan Berlow report that "[s]ince 1963 at least 381 homicide convictions have been overturned because prosecutors concealed evidence of innocence or presented evidence they knew to be false." Thus, so-called "prosecutorial zeal" is often in reality nothing but the arrogant use of power based on prosecutors' mistaken belief that they have a license to do whatever it takes to get a conviction. This kind of chicanery should not surprise anyone familiar with the conservative pessimistic view of human nature. However, conservative pessimism recognizes that sometimes honorable and decent prosecutors are also responsible for convicting the innocent, however unintentionally. They may mistakenly become so convinced that a defendant is guilty that they are psychologically unable to accept the possibility of innocence. If they have any doubts, they use self-deception, rationalization, and excuses to still them. Another explanation is the frequent use of unreliable witnesses. Here, too, the conservative pessimist reminds us that the problem is not just jail-house snitches, because even honest and sincere witnesses can be mistaken. In fact, criminologists cite mistaken eyewitness identification as the most frequent cause of wrongful conviction. 
     In summary: if we retain the death penalty, we intentionally risk the possibility that innocent people will be executed. In fact, it is more than a mere possibility; we can be sure that innocent people will continue to be executed. Moreover, there is no way to reform the system to make that impossible. Since it would be unconscionable to deliberately risk the lives of innocent people, we must abolish the death penalty.
     Fortunately, there is an alternative to the death penalty which is not only acceptable, but is highly preferable to it: life imprisonment without parole. This alternative is preferable, first and foremost, because it cannot lead to executing innocent people. Second, since it is not final and absolutely irreversible like death, errors can be rectified by pardon and release from prison. In addition, even if the harm done cannot be erased as if it had not happened, the victim can at least be given compensation as a partial remedy, along with an acknowledgment of the wrong done.
The stipulation that there can be no parole is necessary, because the punishment must be commensurate with the gravity of  a crime like first degree murder. The importance of not allowing parole is reflected in a 1999 poll of Virginians. When asked only whether they supported the death penalty, 74% said they approved. However, when they were asked to make a choice between the death penalty and life without parole, 54.8% chose the latter. 
     Defenders of the death penalty argue for its retention on three main grounds: deterrence, just deserts, and respect for victim's families. Many people are convinced that the threat of death has a greater deterrence effect than life imprisonment without parole, but there is no scientific evidence to support this view. In fact, a lot of evidence points in the opposite direction. For example, in 1997 the average murder rate per 100,000 population among death-penalty states was 6.6, while for non-death penalty states it was 3.5. Similarly, although the South accounts for 80% of all executions, its murder rate, 8.4, was the highest among regions of  the United States. By contrast, the murder rate for New England, with less than 1% of all executions, had  murder rate of 4.8. The United States,  which has the death penalty in 38 states, has an overall murder rate nearly six times higher than England which abolished the death penalty in 1973. It is not surprising, then, that a recent survey of criminologists and legal scholars found that the 80% believe the existing research fails to support a deterrence justification for the death penalty.
     Defenders also argue that the death penalty is the required punishment for intentional murder, because only death can pay back the murderer in proportion to what he or she has done. Death is the murderer's just deserts; anything less would be unjust. Sometimes it seems that people mean this in a very literal way, namely, that just punishment amounts to paying back in kind, "tit-for-tat." If you kill someone, the state has to kill you. However, a moment's reflection reveals that this way of thinking would lead to some pretty bizarre punishments:  if you rape someone, the state (or a surrogate) must rape you; if you commit perjury, the state must lie to you! Clearly, this will not do. Much more plausible is the idea that the state has an obligation to make the severity of the punishment proportional to the gravity of the offense. However, the list of penalties from which the state may choose in order to meet this obligation must itself be subject to important constraints. For example, it may not use punishments that are inhumane, "cruel or unusual," (for example, amputation or disembowlment). Another important reason why a punishment may not get on the list is that its use would  lead to additional great injustice. Since I have already shown that the use of the death penalty inevitably leads to the great injustice of executing innocent people, the death penalty cannot be on the list of possible penalties. However, there is no similar reason why life imprisonment without parole cannot be on the list of possible punishments. 
    The third reason given for keeping the death penalty is that it alone shows proper respect for victims' families. What people have in mind when they argue this way is the thought that imposing the death penalty does four things for victim's families: it recognizes the gravity of the wrong done to their loved one and the loss they have suffered, it assuages their feelings of outrage and desire for revenge (if any), it constitutes a public expression of the community's condemnation of the murderer, and it acknowledges his or her high degree of blameworthiness. I think everyone can agree that these are among the most important goals of criminal justice. However, it is false that only the death penalty can achieve them. This is shown most clearly by the fact that life imprisonment achieves these goals every day in the 14 states of the United States that do not have the death penalty, as well as in the majority of states around the world (106) that do not have the death penalty. Once people get used to the idea that life imprisonment is (justifiably) the upper limit for punishing murder, they accept it as just and proportional.