MICHAEL HOGUE/DMN

When it comes to the death penalty, there's no shortage of opinion, thought and conjecture, all dressed up as fact. You could devote a week or a year to research and not absorb half of it.

The truth is, if you have a brain, heart and set of personal values, you probably know where you stand on the death penalty, for or against.

Even if your mind is made up, my charge is offering the best reasons Texas should keep its death penalty. It's a view I've held for years.

Here are three reasons that make the most sense:

It's the ultimate punishment for crimes that demand finality: With or without a death penalty, our criminal justice scale will have a top end. Swiping a Snickers from the 7-Eleven isn't the same as strangling a 4-year-old. Degrees of crime demand degrees of punishment.

We judge one set of crimes as the most heinous. In Texas, capital murder is the taking of a life with special circumstances, broadly defined as a child younger than 6; a police officer, firefighter or prison guard performing his or her duty or a judge in retaliation for a ruling; murder for hire; or a murder while committing another felony.

Our ultimate punishment for the ultimate crime must have an indisputable finality. Death penalty opponents would argue that life in prison without the possibility of parole offers that finality without "putting the state in the murder business."

That sounds good, but it's incorrect. Lethal injection, even after years of appeals, is final. Life in prison, while less than ideal for most of us, is breathing and eating behind bars. A living person has options. Escape is one.

One of the Dallas area's most infamous murder cases is evidence.

Irving police Officer Aubrey Hawkins was gunned down Christmas Eve 2000 behind a sporting goods store by inmates who had escaped from the maximum-security Connally Unit in South Texas. One was on a 30-year term; five were on 50- to 99-year sentences. Purported ringleader George Rivas faced 18 life sentences for robbery.

"If I could turn the clock back, to the time when there was no escape, I would still escape," Donald Newbury said. "I had 99 years. In Texas, you do about 85 percent. I'd be 120 years old. What did I have to lose?"

Mr. Newbury and the other five surviving escapees are on death row today. Once their litany of appeals is exhausted, they will be put to death. Barring someone changing Texas law to include amnesty, this much is certain.

But imagine that every capital murderer in Texas instead was sentenced to life without parole. Nothing to lose, nothing but time on their hands.

Escape attempts clearly become more likely. And we can't even sentence attempted escapees to more years unless we intend to bring them back from the dead.

The victims' survivors – a police officer's widow, the mother of a murdered child, the brother and sister of a store clerk shot by a robber – deserve no less than the assurance that the person who caused them such grief will neither escape nor die of old age in prison.

It sends a powerful message: Is it a deterrent? A death penalty opponent's studies would say no; I found at least seven in recent years that say yes. It would be impossible to state this to a moral absolute without interviewing every criminal and prospective criminal.

Short of that, let's use our heads.

Tell your kids, "If you touch that, something bad will happen to you." Some kids will touch it anyway. Some won't, because, well, they're your kids, and they aren't prone to misbehaving. Others will weigh their options and say, "Define 'something bad.' "

The vast majority of humans are built to weigh risk vs. reward: "I need $50. I could rob the convenience store. But what if the clerk resists or pulls his own gun? I could shoot him, but that could mean a death sentence. Or what if a cop shows up? I could shoot him, too, but that's definitely a death penalty. Or I could just run away."

There's a reason many criminals make a general policy of not shooting at police officers. They know, on the off chance that they succeed and get caught, that a Texas jury is almost certain to send them to death row.

Many recent studies show not only that the death penalty deters the taking of innocent life, it would deter even more if executions were timelier.

It's applied fairly, accurately and sparingly: Let's go after the death penalty opposition's myths in one bucket.

Conventional wisdom holds that minorities are disproportionately subjected to the death penalty. (Not true.) That juries in states across the south, including Texas, just can't wait to send another killer to death row. (Not true.) It's likely, if not certain, that the innocent have been put to death. (No supporting evidence.)

A 2004 Cornell University study – authored by acknowledged death penalty opponents – examined U.S. Justice Department statistics and found that black defendants were convicted of 51.5 percent of all murders but made up only 41.3 percent of death row populations. A white murderer, the study found, was about twice as likely to receive a death sentence as a black murderer.

Texas indeed had the highest death row population, but the Cornell study found that our state actually sentenced fewer murderers to death per capita than such states as Nevada, Ohio and Delaware.

The American legal system is built on the daily decisions by professionals (judges and lawyers) and laymen (jurors). Any system that relies on humans will be subject to human frailties, including the possibility of error.

No one wants to execute an innocent person. Rational death penalty supporters want law enforcement held to the highest scrutiny in death cases. Prosecutors must follow every law to the letter. Judges must make sure juries consider all evidence as dispassionately as possible.

A death case adds several layers of protections for defendants. These extra layers, in fact, can sway a prosecutor from pursuing that sentence in favor of a long prison term when the evidence falls short of slam-dunk. This option, of course, diminishes if life without parole replaces death as the top-of-the-scale punishment.

This doesn't mean some ambitious assistant district attorney won't roll the dice on a high-profile case, but this isn't a TV drama. If an innocent person had been put to death, do you think the thousands of top-flight legal minds devoting their professional lives to finding just that case might have pointed it out by now?

The 1,000th U.S. execution since the death penalty returned in 1976 generated a predictable flurry of news coverage in December 2005. Those stories generally failed to note a much larger number, the nearly half-million U.S. murders over the same period.

And the bottom line? I'll spare you the old saw about "a nation of laws," but this is a nation that knows right from wrong. If you want to debate the morality of putting a convicted murderer to death, I can respect that. If your faith or conscience tells you it's wrong, fair enough.

I conceded upfront that this is something that lives in our hearts, brains and personal values, and I won't insult you by questioning yours.

But if this is about whether a child killer or cop killer or a guy who shoots a liquor-store clerk because he didn't empty the register fast enough should die by injection, that's where society and the state of Texas draw the line.

And with a clear conscience, that's where I draw mine.

Mike Hashimoto is an assistant editorial page editor for The Dallas Morning News. This column reflects his personal opinion. His e-mail address is mhashimoto@dallasnews.com.