The death penalty is in the news. The vicious murder of Ukrainian war refugee Iryna Zarutska and political pundit Charlie Kirk has citizens calling for retribution. For much of my political life, I supported the death penalty. As a conservative activist, my instinct was to affirm the rule of law, to insist on accountability, and to recognize society’s right to execute those who commit the most heinous crimes. The death penalty, I believed, was a just response to cold-blooded murder.
In recent years, upon much reflection, I have changed my position. I can no longer support the death penalty in the U.S. This reversal is not the product of sudden sentimentality, nor does it reflect a departure from conservative principles. Instead, it stems from a re-examination of the operational failures of our legal system and the conservative principles of our Founding Fathers. The death penalty may be incommensurable with the conservative values of limited government, human dignity, and the sanctity of life. It is certainly incompatible with the current challenges that our legal system is facing. It is morally corrupt, politically influenced, reckless, and often just random.
One of the strongest arguments for capital punishment has always been its finality: society’s ultimate response to society’s ultimate crime. Yet finality is also the death penalty’s greatest weakness. Recent decades have revealed an unsettling truth: wrongful convictions are not rare anomalies but recurring features of the current criminal justice system.
According to the National Registry of Exonerations, more than 3,400 people in the United States have been exonerated since 1989, with over 190 exonerations from death row specifically. Studies estimate that at least 4% of those sentenced to death in the modern era were innocent of the crimes for which they were sentenced. That means nearly one in twenty executions risks extinguishing the life of someone wrongfully convicted.
Even as forensic technology, such as DNA testing, has advanced, the system itself has not become more reliable. Human error, prosecutorial misconduct, flawed forensic science, and racial bias continue to plague capital cases. The paradox is stark: the tools of truth have improved, but the institutional safeguards for justice remain vulnerable. As conservatives, we insist that government must be restrained because it is prone to error and abuse. Yet the death penalty grants the state the irreversible power to kill—a power that no technological advance can make safe from human fallibility.
Conservatism has long championed skepticism toward government power. We reject centralized control of the economy, bureaucratic overreach, and federal encroachments on individual liberty. Why, then, should we carve out an exception when it comes to the power to take life?
The execution of a citizen or any person is the most extreme act the state can undertake. It requires that the government be trusted not only to determine guilt beyond a reasonable doubt but to apply a punishment fairly, consistently, and without prejudice. Yet our government cannot meet that standard. Capital punishment is applied unevenly across states, counties, and even demographic groups. The likelihood of receiving a death sentence often depends less on the nature of the crime than on geography, race, and the quality of defense counsel. For conservatives, the logic should be consistent: if we do not trust government to deliver the mail efficiently, why should we trust it to decide infallibly who deserves to live and who deserves to die? The conservative commitment to limited government means drawing boundaries around the most dangerous forms of state authority. The power to tax, regulate, and seize property requires restraint; the power to execute requires abolition.
Supporters of the death penalty often frame it as a matter of retribution: a life for a life. The instinct is understandable, rooted in the biblical injunction of lex talionis, the law of retribution. Yet true justice is not reducible to vengeance.
Philosopher Immanuel Kant, often invoked in defense of retributive justice, argued that punishment must respect the dignity of both victim and perpetrator. But in a pluralistic society where human fallibility permeates every institution, the question is whether capital punishment reflects justice or distorts it. The state’s killing of a murderer does not restore the life of the victim, nor does it strengthen social solidarity – particularly when it occurs many years after the criminal has been found guilty and sentenced. It is often reduced to a bureaucratic afterthought, though not much different from an algorithm determining some random outcome. Instead, it risks undermining them, creating a cycle of violence sanctioned by the very government meant to preserve order.
Social solidarity—the idea that society responds collectively to crime—can be expressed more effectively through life imprisonment without parole. This punishment removes dangerous offenders permanently from the public sphere, affirms the seriousness of their crimes, and preserves the possibility of exoneration should evidence later emerge. It communicates society’s condemnation without replicating the very act it condemns.
Another traditional defense of the death penalty is deterrence: the claim that executions dissuade others from committing murder. Yet decades of research have failed to establish credible evidence that the death penalty is more effective than life imprisonment at deterring crime.
The National Research Council concluded that existing studies on deterrence are “not informative about whether capital punishment decreases, increases, or has no effect on homicide rates.” In other words, the deterrence rationale lacks empirical foundation. If the death penalty cannot be justified on grounds of deterrence, and if retribution is distorted by systemic error, then its legitimacy collapses.
In my career as an attorney, I have seen firsthand the shortcomings of our legal system. Instead of delivering justice, our rule of law at its best is costly negotiations and at its worst a random generator of outcomes - not justice. It is because I am a Republican, committed to limited government and human dignity, that I can no longer endorse state executions administered by a broken legal system that we inherited from decades of thoughtless legislation and descent into what I consider to be moral nihilism that has become the modern foundation of our faltering rule of law.
The death penalty represents an excessive concentration of power in the hands of the state, an unreliable and costly feigned instrument of justice, and a practice increasingly out of step with both empirical evidence and moral reasoning. In a society that still values freedom, responsibility, and the protection of the innocent, it has no place.
Yuri Vanetik is an attorney and political strategist in Newport Beach, California. He served as Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s appointee on the California Criminal Justice Commission and California Lottery Commission. He is also a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute.
