On Monday, Illinois Gov. George Ryan announced that he was calling for a moratorium on the death penalty in that state, according to the Associated Press.

The reason was put simply by Gov. Ryan.

“There is no margin for error when it comes to putting a person to death. Until I can be sure that everyone sentenced to death in Illinois is truly guilty … no one will meet that fate,” Ryan said.

He wants to know why more death penalty sentences have been overturned than carried out. Seems reasonable enough.

But reason usually does not come into play with death penalty proponents.

The state of Illinois has sentenced a lot of people to death who should not have been, and they are not alone. Every state in the union utilizing the death penalty runs the same risk every time it ends the life of a man.

One alarming case in Illinois was that of Anthony Porter who was found to be innocent of the charges against him. This was proven by a college journalism class.

After spending 15 years on death row, Porter was saved two days before his education by a bunch of undergraduates. The system failed miserably.

How many people have been wrongfully put to death in this country because of our barbaric need to seek revenge in the most dramatic means possible?

The mind reels at the possibilities and if yours isn’t, ask yourself why.

Do you want justice, or do you simply crave the primitive satisfaction of cleaning out the gene pool one alleged deviant at a time?

No matter how stridently you might support the death penalty, you must also be concerned for its effective use.

Simple-minded, linear arguments that favor the death penalty for its guarantee that no one thus sentenced ever committed another crime take on a whole new meaning when one considers the number of innocent people who will never again commit any act because their government insisted on killing them.

Mistakes happen, especially when each death penalty case can mean re-election for some ambitious governor eager to appear “tough on crime.”

Rationality is the first thing to fly out the window when a death penalty case comes before the court, and that is the time when our reasoning should be the purest.

We can’t do that by parading around outside of courthouses and prisons with frying pans and placards chanting “Burn, baby, burn!”

To be safe, put an end to the death penalty once and for all.

---

Iowa State Daily Editorial Board: Sara Ziegler, Greg Jerrett, Kate Kompas, Carrie Tett and David Roepke.