EJ Montini

opinion columnist

After years of reading and writing about the horrors of violent crime, I decided there are monsters among us who deserve to die, period. And the state should kill them.

But there’s a whole criminal justice system that goes along with implementing the death penalty, and in order to hold onto your belief in capital punishment you must believe in that system.

And now I don’t. I can’t.

Just last week U.S. District Court judge in Phoenix put Arizona’s executions on hold until the resolution of a case involving a controversial drug used by our state to execute the condemned.

It turns out that we stink at killing guys.

We’re so bad at it, and there are so many questions and concerns, legal, medical, financial and moral, that we just need to stop trying.

This was made even more clear by an expansive report on Arizona’s death penalty by The Arizona Republic’s Michael Kiefer, in which the last five reasons I believed – or used to believe – in capital punishment were obliterated.

Fallacy number one: The death penalty is efficient.

Kiefer reported that in Maricopa County Superior Court from 2010 through November 2015 there were 194 ongoing capital cases. Of those, 28 — or 14 percent — ended in death sentences. That doesn’t speak well for the proficiency of prosecutors. Or perhaps for the reasoning that led them to seek the death penalty.

Number two: The death penalty is warranted.

As it turns out, that’s not exactly true either. The Federal Public Defender's Office in Phoenix reported that of the 306 death sentences imposed in Arizona over the last 40 years, 129 — 42 percent — were reversed or remanded on appeal. There will always be some cases that should be overturned. But nearly half?

Number Three: The death penalty is economical.

In this instance, it’s not even close. Taxpayers pay through the nose for both the prosecution and the defense in capital cases. Among the most well-known was the defense for Jodi Arias. Her two trials cost $3.57 million. And we continue to pay for these cases through a long appeals process, spending millions while the condemned spend decades on death row. Some dying there of natural causes.

Number four: The death penalty is equitable.

There are many instances where there is little distinction between killers who got the death penalty and killers who got life in prison or less. Take the case of Daniel Cook, who got the death sentence while his accomplice pleaded to a lesser charge and received a 20-year sentence in exchange for his testimony against Cook. In that sense, the death penalty was not a punishment but a bargaining tool for prosecutors. Is that justice?

Number five: The death penalty is reliable.

The last inmate to be executed in Arizona, Joseph Wood, was injected 15 times with an experimental lethal drug cocktail and spent nearly two hours heaving and gasping before he died. And there was Jeffrey Landrigan, who was executed by drugs the Arizona Department of Corrections obtained unlawfully from Great Britain. How is acting illegally a justifiable way to execute someone? And there was Ray Krone, convicted in 1992 of killing a bartender. He spent 10 years on death row before being exonerated by DNA evidence. Inevitably there will be death penalty mistakes. That's unacceptable.

You may be like me. You may want to support the death penalty.

But there’s only one reason left for any of us to do so:

Ignorance.