A few months ago, I learned that the state of Texas publishes the last words of the men and women it executes. At first, reading through each statement made me feel uneasy, as if I were eavesdropping on a conversation through a door that was mistakenly left cracked open. But after reading through several dozen of the testimonies, amid the disquiet, I began to feel as if I were bearing witness to a small moment of human redemption. To read through each statement is to be introduced to something we would otherwise neglect. It is a small reclamation of humanity for those whom we have deemed to be no longer worthy of it. I was particularly struck by the words of a man, named Reginald, before he was strapped to a table to receive lethal injection: “They are fixing to pump my veins with a lethal drug the American Veterinary Association won't even allow to be used on dogs. I say I am worse off than a dog.” This, in its rawest form, is capital punishment. The death penalty not only takes away the life of the person strapped to the table—it takes away a little bit of the humanity in each of us.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that it would seek the death penalty in the case of Dylann Roof, the twenty-two-year-old accused of walking into the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, last year and murdering nine black members of its congregation after spending the preceding hour praying alongside them.

In response to the D.O.J. announcement, I've been struck by how many self-identified progressives, typically opposed to capital punishment, have said that Roof is an exception and deserves to be killed for what he has done. Such a position—that the death penalty is horrific except when it comes to horrific people—is far from uncommon. It includes the woman likely to be the Democratic Presidential nominee, who, on Thursday, came out in support of the D.O.J.’s decision. And it includes our President, who in his second book, "The Audacity of Hope," wrote, “While the evidence tells me that the death penalty does little to deter crime, I believe there are some crimes—mass murder, the rape and murder of a child—so heinous, so beyond the pale, that the community is justified in expressing the full measure of its outrage by meting out the ultimate punishment.” But herein lies the question: If the very person whose Administration is seeking to kill Roof acknowledges that, according to extensive research, putting Roof to death will not prevent another like him, then what, exactly, is the utility of capital punishment?

Perhaps President Obama and Hillary Clinton assume such a position with a genuine, complex belief that the death penalty is justified, or perhaps it stems from an effort to rebuff the idea that those on the left are soft on crime. Such equivocation, however, panders to the most callous part of us. It is the part that would rather see a man die than ask if we have the right to kill. It is the part of us that would rather have our public policy shaped by anger and notions of retribution than by ideas about rehabilitation and reconciliation.

Those who support the death penalty are accepting a practice that is both ineffective and fundamentally flawed. It means supporting a system that not infrequently kills those with serious mental illness. It means supporting a system in which an execution is far more likely to take place when the convicted murderer is black and the victim is white, than it is when the victim is black and the killer is white. It means supporting a system that has sentenced, and continues to sentence, innocent people to death. In our impulse to rid the world of those we find reprehensible, we forget that we are also ridding the world of those who have done nothing wrong.

Additionally, to call Roof uniquely evil, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has also pointed out, is to ignore the history that made him possible. Roof is not a historical anomaly as much as a representation of a past that America prefers to sweep under its rug rather than commit to cleaning up. When Roof told Tywanza Sanders, one of the victims in the church, “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country and you have to go,” he was echoing a vast history that has used such rationale to decimate black lives. Killing Roof does nothing other than soothe the moral conscience of a country that would rather not reckon with the forces that created and cultivated his ideology.

It is easy not to support the death penalty when there is doubt about the culpability of the person sitting in the chair; it is harder to sustain such principles when the crime of the accused is morally indefensible. But if our principles are only our principles when it is convenient for us, when they align with our visceral emotional responses, then they are, in fact, not principles at all. What’s the point of having progressive principles if they can’t contain your rage?

In Texas, execution No. 270 was that of Napoleon Beazley, who was convicted in the car-jacking murder of John E. Luttig. Beazley was seventeen years old at the time of the offense. In his final statement, he said, “I'm not only saddened but disappointed that a system that is supposed to protect and uphold what is just and right can be so much like me when I made the same shameful mistake.”

If he is convicted, Roof, too, will have last words to share before he is injected with the poison that will take his life. I don’t know what he will say, but I know it won’t bring back those nine people in that church. All it will do is help continue a cycle of brutal retribution in which our tax dollars fund state-sanctioned murder. And it won’t make us all that different from him.