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Justice in death penalty cases requires a standard of perfection that no human institution can deliver.

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Patrick Jason Stollar was supposed to die Wednesday.

The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania planned to kill him, because he had killed an elderly woman during a robbery in Allegheny County.

Primitive justice – an eye for an eye – is still imposed in our supposedly enlightened state, the one that gave the country the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution more than two centuries ago.

Stollar was going to receive a mixture of lethal chemicals that may or may not have promptly rendered him unconscious and immobile and then stopped his heart from beating.

Like every other inmate who has continued to challenge a death sentence in Pennsylvania in the past 19 years, though, Stollar is still alive. A court issued a stay of his execution on July 1.

So Stollar remains one of 184 inmates facing a sentence of death in Pennsylvania.

Since 1995, the state has killed only three convicts, all of whom waived further appeals. The last of Pennsylvania's state-conducted killings was in 1999, fifteen years ago.

Those years, sometimes decades, of appeals are allowed because the most egregious miscarriage of justice is to execute an innocent person.

And given that the criminal justice system is a human institution run by fallible human beings, it sometimes makes mistakes.

The Innocence Project reports that "Eighteen people have been proven innocent and exonerated by DNA testing in the United States after serving time on death row."

Exoneration in Pa.

One of those cases came from Pennsylvania. Nicholas Yarris was convicted in 1982 of kidnapping, raping and murdering a young store clerk. Though hardly an upstanding citizen, Yarris was not the person who committed that crime. Thanks to sophisticated DNA testing that was not available earlier, he was finally exonerated in 2003.

Those lengthy appeals help reveal instances where those accused of serious crimes encountered a prosecution team willing to manipulate the process to produce a guilty verdict or a death sentence.

That's what happened to James Dennis. The Pennsylvanian got his conviction overturned after he spent 20 years on death row. A federal judge concluded that his case was a "grave miscarriage of justice... Improper police work characterized the entirety of the investigation." Among other things, prosecutors had lost evidence corroborating his alibi.

Terrance Williams is another Pennsylvanian facing death in part because of questionable prosecutorial conduct. He won a reprieve of his execution in 2012 because the prosecution had suppressed mitigating evidence that might have spared him the death penalty — the man he killed had sexually abused him for years.

As recently as 2012, a person facing the death penalty in Pennsylvania's largest city might have to put his life in the hands of cut-rate legal help. Philadelphia paid less for indigent-defense lawyers in a capital punishment case than any other county in the state.

When the Pennsylvania Supreme Court ordered a study of Philadelphia's pay in death penalty cases, it found that the amount was "grossly inadequate" and "unacceptably increases the risk of ineffective assistance of counsel."

Death warrants still issued

Despite the years and years that each death penalty case spends in legal limbo, as it undergoes the detailed review intended to ensure justice is done — despite the 19 years that have passed since Pennsylvania last executed a convicted criminal — Pennsylvania still has the death penalty, and Gov. Corbett is still signing death warrants.

This week, he signed his 36th one, for Michael John Parrish. He stands convicted of killing his girlfriend and their 19-month old child.

In July, Corbett signed a death warrant in a case from York County. Hubert L. Michael, Jr. has been sentenced to die for kidnapping and killing Trista Eng.

While the death penalty in Pennsylvania remains an option in theory, in reality, it is a cruel chimera. We simply do not have the stomach to send convicted criminals to the speedy death that survivors of the victims may want.

The extensive legal appeals are essential in a system too easily subject to human error. The long, drawn-out process reflects the ambivalence a civilized society feels about the calculated, premeditating killing of another person in retribution for a crime.

It is time for Pennsylvania to join the other states that have recognized that the death penalty is impossible to administer with the absolute perfection that justice requires.