Imagine you have been taken captive and locked away in a cell by someone who says they are going to kill you. Time passes and you are all alone awaiting death. There is nothing you can do. Your pleas to spare your life fall upon deaf ears. You are held captive for years, maybe even decades. Then, you die. Sounds like a horrible way to spend your remaining years of life, right? Would you hope your capturer receives the death penalty?

Ironically enough, this is what offenders experience on death row. It is far too easy to think of death row inmates as inhuman. After all, they killed at least one person and deserve punishment to the fullest extent the law allows.

The ongoing battle over capital punishment’s cruel and unusual status rears its ugly head every once in a while. On Sept. 3, Paul Hill died in Florida by lethal injection. For those not familiar with the former Presbyterian minister, Hill was responsible for killing an abortion doctor and his bodyguard with a shotgun in 1994.

Hill commented in an interview the day before his execution that he was looking forward to “great reward in heaven,” smiling cheerfully. Although obviously deranged, Hill is still a human being. How can we say killing is wrong and then allow government officials to act against this principle?

Justifying capital punishment has been tried in a number of ways, but there are three rationales for the implementation of a death penalty that ring louder than the rest. First, capital punishment is the only appropriate punishment for a murderer. Some say the punishment must be proportional to the crime, and proportionality can only be fulfilled by taking the life of the murderer. However, our justice system revolves around the fact that prison is a suitable punishment for all acts. While illegal acts vary in severity, so do prison terms. We don’t rape rapists. We don’t assault assaulters. Why should we make an exception for murderers? Since it is not morally permissible to kill a murderer, we can do the next best thing. Instead of taking their life, we take their livelihood. Last time I checked, rotting in jail for half a century couldn’t be considered a light punishment.

As a second justification, deterrence is often cited as good reason for using the death penalty. However, a connection between capital punishment and lower murder rates remains to be seen. For instance, in Iowa, we don’t have the death penalty, but our neighbor to the south does. Despite this fact, Iowa has a murder rate of 1.7 per 100,000 people while Missouri weighs in at nearly four times that amount at 6.6 per 100,000.

In some cases, the death penalty might even encourage criminal behavior. Former minister Paul Hill might have thought twice about his actions if he knew he would be spending a very long time in jail before ascending to heaven (if that’s where he is right now). Instead, the shotgun-wielding Hill slays two people and meets his creator soon after in eternal paradise.

Many people think the single most important job the government has is to protect the people, especially as of late. This is the third reason people support capital punishment. It cannot be disputed that killing someone renders them completely harmless. People supporting the death penalty often mention the fact that one day the murderer could get out of prison, either by escape or through loopholes in the law. In Oklahoma, people can submit an “application for special consideration” after being an inmate for 15 years. Instead of killing people so they won’t be released, maybe we should place requirements on applicants in instances like these. We simply cannot justify a death penalty because parts of our criminal punishment system are flawed.

You can argue for and against capital punishment on many grounds. Statistics can be thrown around in favor of each side all day long and nothing will be accomplished. In order to determine which side is truly right, we must look critically at the situation from a moral standpoint.

When prison can serve as a proper punishment for offenders, why must we go so far as to take the life of an individual? The right to life is perhaps the paramount right a human being has.

To take away this right constitutes the greatest violation of our civil liberties.

Maybe this is the reason the former governor of Texas — the state that executes the most people each year — George W. Bush once said, “There ought to be limits to freedom.”