Even as war keeps spreading, the world is outgrowing many other forms of violence and cruelty. Violent crime outside of war is decreasing in many countries, and so is the death penalty, which is now limited to a small and shrinking list of mostly the worst national governments on Earth and 21 U.S. states (plus six that have paused without yet permanently banning capital punishment). Those 27 states include OH.

Click here to tell your state legislators to catch OH up with the country and the world.

This past week in Texas, last minute heroics were needed to hold off the execution of another apparently innocent man. Since 1973, at least 200 people in the United States have been sentenced to death and then exonerated after herculean efforts and the rare good fortune of having evidence become available. Nobody knows how many innocents have been killed. But those killed have included people with serious mental illness, brain damage, intellectual disability, strong claims of innocence, and people executed over the objections of the victims’ families and despite requests from prosecutors to withdraw their death warrants.

State killing is not a problem simply because it's done wrong. If there were no class or race bias, no mistakes, no painfully botched procedures, no financial expense, and no prosecutorial threats of the death penalty used to frighten any innocent people into plea bargains (and there are inevitably all of those things), it would still be shameful and degrading of our society to be defining certain acts of killing as acceptable.

While there is no evidence that the death penalty deters crimes, it clearly teaches that in the right cases killing is proper and good. And this teaches us that senseless retribution is the framework for lesser punishments as well, thus driving the entire justice system away from restitution, restorative justice, and rehabilitation.

Click here to email your state legislators to ban capital punishment!