Thus far in 2019, there have been 20 executions carried out in the United States.

Eight of them have been in Texas.

There are four more executions scheduled in the country by year’s end, and one of them is to be carried out in Texas. Since the death penalty in the U.S. was reinstated in 1976, there have been a total of 1,510 executions. A staggering 566 of them have been in Texas.

In other words, Texas has been ground zero for capital punishment for over 40 years.

There is no end in sight to Texas executions and few voices, apart from anti-death penalty activists, speak against the practice. It is pathetic that few faith leaders express outrage over what is happening. Equally unacceptable are political leaders who remain silent or give their support to the preposterous idea that some people deserve to be killed.

While many current candidates for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination support abolition, it appears the average person does not see the death penalty as a human rights atrocity. This is understandable given how little human rights culture there is in this country. If human rights violations are discussed by politicians, they are usually treated as another country’s problem. Human rights violations are almost never linked to our own failed policies.

We fail future generations of students, our future leaders, when we neglect to educate them about human rights. No one, including Americans, can demand their human rights if they do not even know what they are.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted after World War II and the Holocaust, enumerated 30 articles of rights to which everyone is entitled. These rights are divided into economic, cultural, social, civil and political groupings.

Two articles of the Universal Declaration touch directly on the death penalty:

Article 3: Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person, and

Article 5: No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment

Accordingly, the public generally splits into two groups: those who believe that everybody, regardless of who they are and what they have done, is entitled to human rights; or those who make excuses why certain individuals, or groups, should be stripped of their human rights and executed.

We maintain that human rights are not exclusively for the good, the moral and the law-abiding among us. They are also for the poor, the marginalized, and yes, the violent and the guilty who have inflicted pain and suffering on others.

In addition to the death penalty’s violation of human rights, there are two additional factors that should make it unacceptable.

First, the death penalty creates a very serious chance that making mistakes will result in executing innocent people. Since 1973 there have been 166 exonerations nationwide of innocent people who were released from death row. Thirteen of those exonerations have been in Texas, which ranks Texas third behind Florida’s 29 and Illinois’ 21 exonerations.

The truly troubling question is whether Texas has actually executed an innocent person. The cases of Cameron Todd Willingham, Ruben Cantu and Carlos DeLuna suggest to many reasonable people that this is the case.

Columbia University Law School professor James Liebman’s book, The Wrong Carlos, details the reasons why the murderer of a convenience store clerk was almost certainly Carlos Hernandez, not the executed Carlos DeLuna. Liebman aptly subtitled the book “Anatomy of a Wrongful Execution.”

No one wants to see an innocent person put to death. Conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat, all want to see innocent people avoid death row and execution. Texas cannot promise that such is the case.

Second, the death penalty wastes millions of dollars. The Dallas Morning News estimated in 1992 that a death penalty case cost Texas $2.3 million, far more than keeping a person in prison for life. That amount of money today translates into $4.2 million. The excessive financial burden of the death penalty is a consistent finding among all death penalty states.

The reasons for the excessive cost are obvious. Death penalty trials are longer because two trials are required, one to determine guilt and one to determine punishment. Pretrial costs are greater, appeals are more lengthy and expensive than non-death penalty cases, and security and incarceration costs are far more than for the general prison population.

The economic cost of the death penalty is no doubt an important reason why more than 130 counties out of Texas’ 254 have never sent anyone to death row. They can’t afford the cost of initiating a death penalty case.

Nations and states are like people; they are supposed to eventually grow up and become better. Texas needs to join the ranks of those jurisdictions in this country and around the world that have committed to the idea that society should no longer liquidate people and to the idea that truly there is no such thing as a lesser person.

For those who believe that a person can be so vile as to deserve execution, we share the words of J.R.R. Tolkien’s character Gandalf:

“Deserves death?! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give that to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends.”

Rick Halperin is director of the Embrey Human Rights Program at Southern Methodist University.

Roger C. Barnes is chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio.

They wrote this column for The Dallas Morning News.