This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

The evidence suggests that capital punishment in the United States — in a trend that lags far behind the rest of what we would call the civilized world — may be about to expire.

While the Supreme Court of the United States has waffled and dodged the issue, individual states have slowly but surely reduced executions to a number lower than any seen in the last 25 years, even as some states have done away with the death penalty altogether.

Utah nearly joined that trend in the last session of the Legislature. Come January, lawmakers would be wise to end the awkward, if not downright gruesome, dawdling, and vote to take the ultimate penalty off the books.

The liberal arguments against the death penalty are well-known and, in some places, have won the day.

Capital punishment has never been shown to be an effective deterrent. It is much more likely to be visited on the poor and members of minority groups who lack both high-powered legal counsel and the benefit of the doubt that comes with white privilege.

For centuries we have attempted to make executions more palatable to polite society, first by removing them from public view, then by pretending that various new methods — electrocution, gas, lethal injections — were more humane.

But they aren't. That has been demonstrated by ghastly cases of condemned prisoners who gasped and twitched in execution chambers for prolonged periods of time. That, plus the fact that companies that make life-saving drugs understandably object to their products being perverted to end lives, has made the practice more difficult.

Now the conservative case against state-mandated death is gaining more followers. The reasons from the right include the cost of a capital case, often charged to small counties that cannot afford it, and the understanding that giving the state the power to end a human life is the polar opposite of small-government thinking.

The very conservative Nebraska Legislature last year voted to end the death penalty in the Cornhusker state for those very reasons. (Though a petition drive seeking to re-instate capital punishment means the issue will be on the ballot this November.)

Those thoughts were also enough to convince the Utah Senate to vote during the 2016 session to end capital punishment here, though that bill died without a vote in the House.

The issue should come up again in the 2017 session.

The death penalty deserves to die. Utah's elected representatives should affirmatively end it rather than wait for the federal courts to command such a change.