Last Thursday, the practice of lethal injection was challenged in a federal court in Columbus, Ohio. The lawsuit, filed on behalf of death row inmates Adremy Dennis and Richard Cooey, alleges that the particular use of chemicals causes unseen torturous pain in its recipients — thus violating the Eighth Amendment. Regardless of the validity of the lawyers’ claim, their case brings to light the question of necessity regarding our use of capital punishment.

Is capital punishment necessary to protect society from our most heinous criminals? An examination of the issue clearly shows it is not only unnecessary, but hypocritical in making a statement against killing people by turning around and, well, killing people.

Necessity is the defining element of self-defense. When faced with a physical threat, individuals have the right to protect themselves using whatever means are available, so long as those means don’t cross the line of excess.

For example, an individual confronted by someone who seeks to physically harm him or her has the right to put down the attacker by using the minimal means necessary to safely stop the attack — be it via threat or warning, “hand to hand” defense or the use of weapons. Every situation differs because the people involved, their personal circumstances, and available means of protection are never quite the same. The point of self-defense is to stop an attack while retaining moral high ground. Once the threat of attack is gone, further action is no longer considered self defense.

Continued violence against an attacker may be explained by the heat of the moment, but not excused. In other words, excessive use of force is not defensive, but criminal.

This line of reasoning is extended from the individual to society through our use of jails and prisons to protect ourselves from all sorts of criminals. Those deemed to represent a relatively minor danger to others are typically sent to minimum security institutions where they spend shorter amounts of time incarcerated.

It makes sense: minor punishments for minor crimes. Conversely, major crimes such as rape and murder warrant longer sentences carried out in more closely controlled environments.

Again, the logic adds up: major sentences for major crimes. In all cases, the sentence handed down is intended to fit the crime by protecting society proportional to the threat posed by the convicted individual.

Capital punishment falls outside of this model. By choosing to end the life of an individual in its custody, the state rejects the principles of self-defense in favor of using unnecessary force to subdue a threat. Once a person is found guilty and sent to prison, he or she no longer represent a threat to society.

Even if that person’s future release is deemed out of the question, capital punishment is still unnecessary because another effective solution, life imprisonment, exists. Therefore, capital punishment crosses the line of excess whereby the state can no longer claim moral high ground. It amounts to little other than judicial murder.

Rather than exacting excessive punishment through the death penalty, our government should abolish its use, as have virtually all other industrialized nations. In leading by example, our government would send a clear and strong message to citizens that killing people isn’t an acceptable way of dealing with our problems.

By contrast, our government sends the message that killing people is, in fact, an acceptable way to deal with problems. Perhaps this is why the United States has (by far) the highest murder rate of all industrialized nations.

The government should not be in the business of killing people. Our use of capital punishment puts us among nations such as China, Iran and North Korea in terms of the number of human beings judicially murdered. That’s some pretty bad company.

It’s time to join the 21st century and abolish capital punishment.