If Governor John Kitzhaber is so opposed to capital punishment, he should end his state's sale of lethal-injection drugs.

Just last month Oregon's third-term governor announced his principled new stand that he would no longer enforce his state's death penalty. Looking back on the two executions he personally oversaw, Governor John Kitzhaber, a physician, told a room full of reporters:

They were the most agonizing and difficult decisions I have made as Governor and I have revisited and questioned them over and over again during the past 14 years. I do not believe that those executions made us safer; and certainly they did not make us nobler as a society. And I simply cannot participate once again in something I believe to be morally wrong.

Kitzhaber explained that he wanted his action to force his state's legislature to overhaul its capital-punishment system, which he considers inequitable, arbitrary, and a source of expensive legal battles. Though he could have commuted the sentence of every inmate on death row, he did not, in deference to the will of the people who last reinstated the death penalty in 1984.

His alternative strategy involves issuing a temporary reprieve each time a case winds its way through the legal system all the way to a scheduled execution date. This technical hitch puts Oregon in a state of purgatory until new legislation is written and passed, a new referendum is held, or Kitzhaber leaves office.