Pennsylvania reenacted the death penalty in 1974. In the past 30 years, the state has executed three people. It has also freed six innocent people who were on death row. Today, 226 are on death row in Pennsylvania. Only California, Florida and Texas house more death row inmates. Of the 226, there are 137 Black inmates, 19 Latino inmates, two Asian inmates and 68 White inmates. Of those states holding more than two prisoners on death row, Pennsylvania has the highest percentage of minorities facing execution.

In the past few months, it looked like Pennsylvania’s death row population would be reduced to 224 by now, and to 223 by next month. Anthony Washington was sentenced to death in October 1994, and was scheduled to be executed on Oct. 9. Raymond Solano was sentenced to death in May 2003, and was scheduled to die on Oct. 11. Ramon Sanchez was sentenced to death in March 2003, and was scheduled to die on Nov. 15. Because there are looming questions about whether death by injection, the method of execution in Pennsylvania, is a constitutionally prohibited form of cruel and unusual punishment, which the United States Supreme Court has agreed to consider, in the past few weeks, these and many other scheduled executions across the country have been put on hold.

Earlier this month, the American Bar Association Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project urged a major overhaul to Pennsylvania’s death penalty system after studying the system for over two years. The report warned of errors in the system that left open the possibility of an innocent person being executed, and also pointed out that the death penalty was applied inconsistently within the commonwealth, such that people convicted of murder under very similar circumstances wound up with very different sentences. Last year, the legislature became so concerned about systemic flaws leading to wrongful convictions that it authorized the Joint State Government Commission Committee on Wrongful Convictions.

Despite this track record, the executive branch of the commonwealth wants to execute the 226 on death row on our behalf. Thank you, but no thank you. Please don’t execute anyone on my behalf. As a citizen, I cannot authorize or condone the taking of a life without complete confidence that the system used to investigate, charge, convict and sentence those condemned to death is perfectly accurate, moral, ethical, just, fair and accountable. Our criminal justice system is undeserving of those descriptions.

We know that there have been major league mistakes in Pennsylvania death penalty cases. Because of those mistakes, six people condemned to death have been freed from death row. Fortunately, the errors in those cases surfaced before it was too late. If an airline crashed at least six flights out of a total less than 250, would you recommend traveling on its next flight to Los Angeles? Until the systemic flaws are addressed, I think it’s shameful for us as a society to execute another person on Pennsylvania’s death row.

Moreover, let us consider how the death penalty is administered in Pennsylvania. Once a murder is committed in county X, and there is probable cause to believe a particular person is responsible, assuming the facts would support the charge, the local prosecutor has the option of seeking or not seeking death. He or she does not need to go to a central authority within the state to make sure that all like cases in the state are treated alike. This is contrary to the federal system where all death penalty decisions are made at main Justice in Washington, D.C., no matter which U.S. attorney’s office is in charge of the prosecution. Some prosecutors and some communities are more reluctant to impose the death penalty than others. Therefore, where the prosecutor in county X may seek death, under the same facts and circumstances, the prosecutor in county Y may seek life imprisonment instead. Bowing to political realities, a local prosecutor with a constituency largely in favor of the death penalty is far more likely to seek death than one in an area where the citizens are largely in favor of abolishing the death penalty. Whether or not you die in Pennsylvania for a crime very much depends on the county in which the crime was committed.

Before the death penalty should be considered as an acceptable prosecutorial option in this commonwealth, our officials in both the executive and legislative branches need to be on higher ground. To be on higher ground will require both branches to address effectively all systemic flaws that have allowed for wrongful convictions in capital and other cases, to put in place a central system that insures fairness in selecting the cases in which death will be sought and to establish rules that permit juries considering whether to impose a death sentence to consider how the crime and defendant before them compare to other crimes and defendants in cases where a life sentence was imposed. At the end of the day, it may not be possible to administer the death penalty fairly. If it can’t be done, the death penalty must be abolished. If it can be done, we can then talk about whether the death penalty is moral, and on balance, represents a governmental policy that is consistent with American values.

n Allan Sobel is the director of the Arlin M. Adams Center for Law and Society at Susquehanna University.