how much is a problem?

Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens recently spoke out against the death penalty, saying that capital cases take a huge part of the Supreme Court's time.

The full article explains his position in more detail.

What I'm intrigued about though is the discussion at the end of the article. It notes that Death Penalty Information Center gives a number of 3 dozen death row inmates have been exonerated since 2000.

Most interesting to me is that Kent Scheidegger, lawyer for a pro-death penalty group is quoted at the end of the article as saying "I wouldn't say that 20 or 30 cases out of 8,000 constitutes a broken system."

Firstly I don't know that I disagree with him. I have always thought I was a fan of capital punishment though I admit that I don't think about it all that often. And, assuming that 30 folks are exonerated on death row, then out of 8,000 cases nationwide, that's less than a half of one percent are killed erroneously.

However, I must ask now if that itself is too much. I believe most folks think human life is supposed to be worth more than anything else (which is rubbish, the individual life doesn't matter only the species). So if even the remote possibility exists that you might be killing an innocent man, shouldn't that be enough to stop all executions?

Especially if I consider the views of the pro-lifers (note I am pro-choice) whose ideology is that all human life is precious, and you can't kill the life inside the womb. I would think then that pro-lifers would be the most vocal anti-death penalty advocates. I mean, human society can by no means dish out "justice". We only have a "justice system" that is as capable of committing errors as the humans running it are.

Let us give pause then, and think about the consequences of our actions.