If you want to start an argument in a phone booth with two people, the best subject to bring up might be the death penalty. Recent polling both nationally and here in Colorado tells us that just about half of Americans (49 percent nationally and 47 percent here) support the death penalty, while about 47 percent oppose it. Support has been falling for years, and recently it fell below 50 percent for the first time since the death penalty was restored by the Supreme Court in the mid 1970s.

Colorado is one of 32 states, along with the federal government, that still has capital punishment. We haven’t executed anyone since 1997, though we currently have three people sitting on death row in Canon City, awaiting their fate. In all 32 states, lethal injection is the primary means of execution, though in some states, the inmate may request a different instrument of death. For example, in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia, the condemned may request electrocution. In Arizona and California the gas chamber is available. In Utah you can be shot and in Washington you can mount a scaffold to be hanged.  But one common theme seems to cut across all these states, and that is the location and time of death – deep within a prison and in the wee hours of the morning. This, I posit, is wrong. I am calling for the return of public executions, at high noon, in the town square. Yup.

Let me explain. I am actually against the death penalty, for two basic reasons. First, I think the behavior of our wonderful Colorado ought to be better than the behavior of the worst members of our society. I would prefer the State have a higher standard for life than the scum that sit on death row. And, as an aside, I personally feel that life in prison, without the possibility of parole, is actually a much harsher sentence than death. To know that you will remain is a small room, never again to be free to walk in a park, to take in a movie, and to fall in love, is a fate literally worse than death, in my view. And it is actually cheaper, but that’s for another column.

The second reason I oppose capital punishment is the much more powerful one. The ultimate evil a state could commit would be to execute an innocent person. Since the death penalty came back, we’ve executed about 1450 people, with over 1/3rd  of those – 546 – in Texas alone. And in those years, advances in criminal science, DNA especially, has allowed for a careful review of many of those cases. And while the vast majority of those on the various death rows in this nation are monsters that are guilty beyond any doubt, in those same years 161 people have been freed from death rows due to their actual innocence being proven. In Texas, 13 condemned people were proven not guilty by DNA and other sciences during the same time they sent over 500 to their deaths. Can you really believe that Texas got things exactly right, and killed the 546 that were guilty, without a single mistake? I don’t.  Oh, and we’re also one of only nine countries, including those noble nations of Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia, that execute minors. Proud?

If we lock someone away and ten years later we find out that he or she was innocent, we can release them. We cost them years of freedom, but we can right the wrong, at least to a degree. But what words will comfort the sons and daughters, the mothers and fathers, of those wrongly killed by a state? What words can make that all better? I have none.

Which is why, as an anti-death penalty person, I am calling for Colorado and the rest of the nation to stop hiding the tools of death in a small hidden room at one minute past midnight. If we, as a nation, reject the argument that the state and the nation should be better than the worst of us, if we reject any chance that we might be murdering an innocent person rather than executing a guilty one, then let’s stop pretending it isn’t a dirty business and let’s make it public. We used to have public executions. I call for public hangings, injections, shooting, and more because if we are truly not embarrassed by this behavior, why hide it?