In a recent Greensboro News & Record op-ed, Marshall Hurley, a long-time Republican in North Carolina, ques­tioned giv­ing the state author­i­ty to car­ry out exe­cu­tions when the cur­rent prac­tice of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment fails to meet con­ser­v­a­tive stan­dards and risks inno­cent lives. He stated: 

For those who believe in the virtue of lim­it­ed gov­ern­ment and crit­i­cize round­ly when gov­ern­ment does not work well, cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment does not meet fun­da­men­tal con­ser­v­a­tive stan­dards. Not only is it applied arbi­trar­i­ly, but our judi­cial sys­tem can­not even fig­ure out how to exam­ine it prop­er­ly. Forty-sev­en judges review­ing a sin­gle case over more than a dozen years may assure some that jus­tice is served; to oth­ers, it evinces an appeals process in dis­ar­ray, a game of such utter com­plex­i­ty that noth­ing is cer­tain except delay and dis­may. No one is well served — not fam­i­lies of vic­tims, not law enforce­ment and cer­tain­ly not the judi­cial sys­tem.
…
North Carolina con­ser­v­a­tives, lib­er­als and every­one in between should ques­tion whether our state gov­ern­ment should autho­rize exe­cu­tion of peo­ple when we know, to a moral cer­tain­ty, that some of them are inno­cent. There is no prin­ci­pled jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for any con­ser­v­a­tive to place lim­its on gov­ern­ment pow­er in all oth­er areas, but grant it the pow­er to kill, know­ing it will make mistakes. 

(Greensboro News & Record, July 27, 2003). See New Voices.

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