I’ve mentioned before how much I enjoy the Colorado Politics section called Out West Roundup. And the latest edition is yet another great – what word should I use? – oh, I know – roundup of important goings on in the American West. I am always especially interested in what’s going on in Wyoming, a wonderful state that I called home during my first Air Force tour of duty as an ICBM launch officer back from 1981 until 1986. Cheyenne is a lovely town and a scenic state capital, and a story on line now caught my eye. 

It seems that some of Wyoming’s elected leaders are giving serious consideration to eliminating that state’s death penalty. While final passage is by no means assured, a legislative committee advanced the repeal bill to the state senate. If passed and signed by the governor, Wyoming would become the 24th state to abolish the death penalty, a list that includes Colorado, as we banned executions last year.

There was a time back in the mid-1990s when public support for the death penalty reached 80 percent. That number has now plummeted to 56 percent in a recent poll, with the number of Americans believing the death penalty is applied fairly now below 50 percent. 

I readily admit that my thoughts on the death penalty have evolved over time. I do have moral qualms with the idea of a government echoing the worst behavior of our worst citizens, but I found no real issue with horrible killers being put to death. But no more. 

I have come to oppose the death penalty for a number of reasons. I personally believe that a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole is actually a harsher sentence than death. But my strongest concerns with the death penalty center around the seemingly arbitrary manner in which the penalty is applied, the racism inherent in its application, and the overwhelming worry that a judge and a jury can (and have) made mistakes, and that innocent Americans have been killed by the very government sworn to protect them.

One of my heroes, the late US Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, was appointed to the high court as a conservative. But over his decades of judicial service, Blackmun came to believe that the death penalty was inherently biased, and therefore was unconstitutional. In a famous opinion he wrote in 1994, Blackmun noted the intrinsic and unbeatable shortcomings and biases in capital punishment. Blackmun stated, “the death penalty experiment has failed… From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.”  Thus, we come to my fundamental reason to oppose capital punishment – we are human, we make mistakes. 

If we, say, sentence an innocent person to jail for 50 years, and then a few years later we find proof that that person was, in fact, innocent, we can release him or her from prison. We cannot restore the years lost to a false guilty finding, but we can at least set that person free. But if we execute a guiltless person, what remedy do we have? This is, quite simply, the worst mistake a government can make.

And it is interesting to note one of the reasons behind the Wyoming effort to repeal the death penalty: costs. The legislators proposing the repeal note that getting rid of the death penalty would save the state roughly $870,000 per year, a tidy sum in a state with the smallest population in the nation. Indeed, every study since the penalty was restored in 1976 has shown that abolishing executions reduces prison costs, even when things like life-long imprisonment costs are added in. 

Now, don’t get me wrong. I do not mourn the loss of Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy. And I understand that taking life is sometimes necessary, having served over 25 years of active duty in the Air Force. Heck, my first AF job – the aforementioned ICBM launch officer tour – required that I be willing to launch nuclear weapons at our enemies, killing millions in the process. I accepted that as part of my military duty. But such potential killings are, in my mind, quite different from a state-run system of executing its own citizens. I strongly believe that part of the price we must pay to live in a society that does not execute the innocent is that we must also not execute those we are quite certain are guilty. Why? Well, there is strong evidence that we have, as a nation, put the wrong (and innocent) people to death. 

If you can give me the words that, say, Gov. Polis could speak to the family of an innocent person executed by the state that makes everything ok, I’m willing to reconsider my opposition. But until those magic words appear, the cost of killing the innocent is far too high to justify the execution of the guilty. 

I congratulate Wyoming and wish them good luck in putting astern the machinery of death.