Capital punishment is homicide by government. It should be abolished.

The “Cause of Death” will read HOMICIDE. The next two death certificates will read HOMICIDE, Terre Haute, Indiana. Is there a serial killer loose in rural Terre Haute, Indiana? No, these deaths will be caused by the federal government.

Daniel Lewis was sentenced to die in 1999, 21 years ago. Wesley Ira Purkey was sentenced in 2001, 19 years ago. Dustin Lee Honken was sentenced to die in 2004, 16 years have passed. All three have spent most of the past 20 years living in solitary, allowed only one hour per day outside their cells, no communication with others, and in constant threat of the end of life coming for them tomorrow.

These three men have been convicted of heinous crimes, multiple deaths, and mutilation. They should never be released into society again. But, should the federal government or state governments be involved in committing homicide?

Here are a few verifiable facts about capital punishment:

1. Statistics indicate 25 percent of convicted people will die before the sentence is carried out, either sickness, murdered by other convicts, or suicide.

2. Penalty of death does not deter the person committing the crime. States with death penalty have the same rate of capital crime as those without the death penalty.

3. The cost of capital punishment case can exceed costs of life-time incarceration by $2.4 million dollars.

4. Offenders of color out pace white offenders in receiving the sentence of death. Invoking the punishment is too often arbitrary and racially motivated.

5. There is no reversing the death penalty once it is administered. Perhaps 4 percent of death row inmates are innocent resulting in, perhaps, 4 percent of deaths administered to innocent people. One in 10 people on Death Row have been found to be innocent since 1973, 156 in all.

Groups objecting to the use of capital punishment include the Conference of Catholic Bishops, Pope Francis, Methodists, Lutherans, Baptists, NAACP, and others. There is no justifiable reason for the cost and time necessary for invoking the death penalty when life imprisonment is, perhaps, a less costly and more severe sentence.

The only reason to maintain capital punishment is to provide a vindictive, vengeful outlet for the offended survivors and the public.

We cannot forget the terrible, sinister damning offense. Many times, family members and others demand death of the offender for their own “closure.” They, and we, will be called to remember the horrors for decades to come in new trials, new appeals, new court decisions. There will never be closure for them, or the public, until we forgive the offender. Capital punishment eliminates the opportunity for redemption.

If you wish the offender “to rot in hell”, there is no better hell in which to rot than in our prisons. Life continued offers the potential for redemption. It is time to end the barbaric practice of capital punishment.

Lincoln Christensen is a resident of Richmond, KY. He is a life-long Unitarian Universalist, political independent, socially liberal fiscal conservative and free thinker.