The moment is right for you to call for a moratorium on the death penalty, while the country debates its continuance in light of new knowledge that who-knows-how-many innocent people have been, and will be, sentenced to death. Exposés of the criminal-justice system -- of police who fabricate evidence, of public defenders who fall asleep in courtrooms while their clients are on trial for their lives, of state governments that pay as little as $800 to private lawyers assigned to defend a charge of murder, the costliest defense to mount -- printed in publications like The Chicago Tribune and magazines like The Atlantic Monthly have strengthened the case against the death penalty's awful finality. No amount of exculpating evidence, after all, can save a dead man. The Republican governor of Illinois, elected as a death-penalty supporter, has given the country a display of moral courage by suspending executions in Illinois, where men have been on death row for years for crimes DNA evidence shows they did not commit.

Using DNA evidence, Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld of the Innocence Project have freed forty men imprisoned mainly for rape and murder. Currently, they have two hundred "active cases," and a backlog of a thousand cases. Only two states, Illinois and New York, allow the use of DNA evidence "post-conviction" -- i.e., after sentencing. Perhaps the single most justice-affirming step you could take, Mr./Ms. President, would be to urge more states to allow it, so that all prisoners whose guilt or innocence could be determined by DNA evidence can be tested. Ninety-two percent of Americans, according to one poll, favor this.

The advance of science and technology has mostly weakened restraints on killing; one thinks of bombing sleeping families from a morally sanitizing 30,000 feet. In On Aggression Konrad Lorenz wrote that man is the only animal with no intra-species check on violence; technology has made this propensity for fratricidal aggression lethal to the planet. The use of DNA evidence to save innocent men from the death penalty, however, represents a different relation of science to violence. Rather than distancing moral actors from the consequences of their violent acts, in this case science arms the rules of civil society to restrain the impulse to kill. This is the larger point you should make, Mr./Ms. President: that restraining that impulse in the face of technological distancing is the moral challenge of our age and that we must find a way to use science and technology to make us more, not less, human. Suspending the death penalty would model for society the assertion of scruple against the inhuman mechanisms and bureaucratic automatisms that invite men to act like machines.

Mr./Ms. President, mount the bully pulpit and ask Americans who support the death penalty to examine their consciences. Yes, the death penalty in the U.S. is beyond your authority; executions for federal crimes aside, it is normally a state issue. But it has now become an issue of justice transcending state boundaries. Make the debate national, Mr./Ms. President. Make it so that no politician can ever again run for office in America without confronting the truth about what can amount to official murder. Men and women are too fallible, human judgment too erratic, law enforcement too bureaucratically committed to winning convictions at any cost for society to countenance the penalty of death.