Democrats should "take the high ground on capital punishment"

In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, Bill Keller suggests that Democratic presidential hopefuls either voice opposition to the death penalty or stand behind death penalty reform efforts, such as those cited in the recent Illinois Capital Punishment Commission's report:

    A gutsy Republican governor, George Ryan of Illinois, has now pointed the way to a moral high ground that happens to be politically tenable, too. Mr. Ryan appointed a commission rich in courtroom experience to study the state's practice of capital punishment, and this week it produced a clearheaded (and surprisingly readable) document. The report inventories the arbitrary and error-prone system that puts people � sometimes the wrong people � on death row. It proposes a menu of reforms, among them videotaping interrogations to prevent dubious confessions, expanded use of DNA testing and diminishing reliance on single-witness or stool-pigeon accounts. Democrats should press for a nationwide moratorium on executions pending real reforms to minimize the risk of killing people by mistake.

     Real boldness would be to join a narrow majority of the Illinois commission, and the rest of the civilized world, in disavowing the death penalty as a barbaric practice. But the Ryan commission offers a political halfway house for the less courageous. "Repair or repeal," said Thomas P. Sullivan, the former prosecutor and co-chairman of the Illinois commission. "Fix the capital punishment system or abolish it. There is no other principled recourse."