Let me get right to the point:

I am against the death penalty.

Not because I minimize the horror of murder. Not because I believe every crime can be forgiven, although I do believe forgiveness is always a good goal. And certainly not because I don’t understand the emotional devastation left behind when someone deliberately takes another human life.

I oppose capital punishment because I don’t believe the answer to killing should be killing. As the saying often attributed to Gandhi goes, An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. I really do believe this, with all my heart.

It’s medieval torture. And is less about accountability and more about revenge and vengeance, emotions that I believe are destructive and uncivilized.

It troubles me deeply when a government tells us that murder is wrong —unless it is the government doing it. We call one killing a crime and another justice. But murder is murder, no matter who does it. We do not have a right to take a life. It is immoral in every case.

And then there is the possibility of error. It’s greater than you think. Innocent people have been convicted and sentenced to die. And then executed. More often than we’d like to believe.

No legal system run by human beings is infallible. Ask any person of color about that.

An execution cannot be undone.

Life imprisonment is the more civilized option. It protects and holds a perpetrator accountable. It acknowledges the magnitude of the crime without asking the state to take a life.

You may ask why we should be civilized when the murderer was not. I have an answer:

Justice does not require us to become what we condemn.

We can be outraged by evil, protect the innocent and demand accountability without taking another life.

That is not weakness.

To me, it is simply being a civilized human.