During my tenure as Virginia attorney general, from 1998 to 2001, my state executed 36 people. Being that close to the process – seeing the death penalty cases that were appealed, waiting in my office each time a man faced his execution – had a profound effect on me. Overseeing a legal system that put so many to death caused me to consider more carefully the entire system this country has in place – a system that purports only to execute criminals who truly deserve the ultimate penalty, while sparing the innocent.

Today, I serve with other men and women on the Constitution Project's Death Penalty Committee – many of whom are people like me: we have personally prosecuted capital cases and still support the death penalty philosophically, but we can no longer deny the grave problems we know lead to wrongful convictions and executions of innocent people.

There are so many systemic failures – convictions based on shoddy or outmoded forensic science; death sentences imposed because defense counsel lacked the resources, skills or motivation to conduct a proper investigation; states conducting executions using secret, untested drugs that result in gruesomely botched executions like the one we witnessed in Oklahoma two weeks ago – that I am compelled to speak out and demand reform.

My first brush with inadequacies of the system came when I was just two years out law school. A court appointed me to represent a young man charged with capital murder – and I realize now that I had no business taking a case in which a person's life was at stake. Fortunately, we were never forced to go to trial. The lead detective on the case happened to be an old family friend, and I was able to get him to see key pieces of evidence in a different light, and my client was ultimately released. At the time, I thought it was just an aberration, not a fatal flaw built into the system.

During my decade of service as a Virginia state senator after that, I supported our state's use of the death penalty. I was a conservative, Republican politician in a southern state – so frankly, the issue didn't require much thought. I believed that our state’s justice system was fair, that we sent the right people to death row.

But when I served as attorney general, the lawyer in my office who was charged with defending death sentences before our state appeals court and in federal court had a wealth of experience and was very good at his job. Most of the defense attorneys I saw go up against him were just simply outclassed: they lacked the training, experience and resources to have much of any chance at success, no matter how strong their clients’ case might have been. A few of them were flat-out incompetent.

By the time a capital case gets to the appeals process, after a conviction and death sentence have been handed down, the deck is already stacked against the defendant – and, procedurally, the system is built to uphold convictions, not overturn them.

Watching failures like this from a proverbial front-row seat made me realize that, though the death penalty may be justified in some circumstances, the procedural safeguards are too weak to adequately protect the innocent. After witnessing how my own state's death penalty system really worked, I just didn’t have the heart for it anymore.

I am not unique in having the scales fall from my eyes after such immediate contact with the lack of justice and fairness in state death penalty systems throughout the United States.

Last week, my colleagues and I at the Constitution Project released a comprehensive report, examining problems from the moment of arrest to an inmate's execution. We outlined 39 detailed recommendations that any state that wishes to continue using the death penalty must adopt to ensure a system that is administered in a more just and constitutional manner.

President Obama has called on US Attorney General Eric Holder to review death penalty procedures across the country. I would urge the Department of Justice to take an even broader view, and to look at our report as a roadmap to guide their investigation. Oklahoma's attorney general on Thursday granted a 180-day stay of execution for its next death-row inmate, and I would urge that state to adopt our proposals as well.

We all know what is wrong with our death penalty system, supporters and abolitionists alike. There are those who say it can never be "fixed" – and they may right. But there are real changes that can reduce errors. We need to recognize states like Virginia and Oklahoma are not about to end the death penalty any time soon. So long as states choose to employ capital punishment, we have a moral duty to eradicate known, documented problems that allow wrongful convictions and inhumane executions. I now know that this detailed approach to reform – and not just blind opposition – is the truly conservative position on capital punishment.