Georgia is home to many firsts. We were the first state to implement electronic voting statewide, the first to lower the voting age from 21 to 18, and the first to grant married women full property rights. Next week, Georgia plans to achieve another, more dubious, first. We may be the first state to execute an inmate after a nationwide six-month de facto moratorium on capital punishment.

Across the country, the death penalty has been on hold while the U.S. Supreme Court considered whether Kentucky's three-drug lethal injection protocol constituted cruel and unusual punishment. In mid-April, in a 7-2 decision, the court upheld the Kentucky procedure. Seven of the nine justices wrote opinions, indicating how far we are from reaching a consensus on capital punishment.

In particular, Justice John Paul Stevens' opinion gives one pause. Relying on his 33 years of experience on the Supreme Court, Stevens reached the conclusion that the death penalty itself is unconstitutional. It represents, he wrote, "the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes." These are powerful words coming from an associate justice who voted to bring back the death penalty to our state and the nation more than 30 years ago in Gregg v. Georgia.

In Gregg, the court upheld Georgia's death penalty statute with the understanding that procedures would be in place to prevent its discriminatory or arbitrary application. But, as this newspaper reported after a two-year investigation, quoting former Chief Justice Norman Fletcher of the Georgia Supreme Court, "It's like a roulette wheel."

There were 2,328 murder convictions in Georgia from 1995-2004, but only 57 death sentences were imposed, and of those, eight were later overturned. Not all murder cases are death penalty eligible; of the 1,315 that were, only 127 —- fewer than one in 10 —- went to trial with the state seeking the death penalty.

Everyone agrees the death penalty was intended to be reserved for the worst of the worst, and everyone knows it simply doesn't work out that way. All deliberate, unjustified takings of human life, are, in the words of the Georgia statute, "vile, horrible, and inhumane."

Still, as the law recognizes, some are more vile, more horrible and inhumane than others. They are not necessarily the ones that draw the death penalty.

Geographical disparity plagues the system. One example: Prosecutors outside metropolitan Atlanta are far more likely to seek the death penalty for murders that involve armed robbery. Some prosecutors are simply more likely to seek the death penalty, making the punishment turn not on what the defendant did, but on where he did it.

Moreover, discrimination still poisons the process. The Journal-Constitution's investigation found that Georgia prosecutors were more than twice as likely to seek the death penalty when the victim was white. A just-released study found that in Houston, a black defendant is significantly more likely than a white defendant to be sentenced to death.

Even if we could control for these unacceptable disparities, it is an unsettling fact that we will never eradicate the possibility of human error. Since 1973, 127 people on death row have been exonerated. Five of them were in Georgia. With the availability of DNA testing, these numbers are on the rise.

The death penalty is not the only way we can deter murderous crime and keep dangerous people off the streets. Most states, including Georgia, authorize sentences of life without parole. In public opinion polls, support for the death penalty drops significantly when life without parole is offered as an alternative.

The social and economic costs of capital punishment appear to be staggering. And yet, there is no convincing evidence that the death penalty deters offenders from killing.

In a 1995 national poll, police chiefs ranked the death penalty last among effective ways to reduce violent crime.

Shouldn't the General Assembly study the matter, determine what the costs are and consider whether that money can be, as the police chiefs think, better spent?

Why not be the first state to complete a 21st-century evaluation of the fairness, the accuracy and the social utility of capital punishment?

> Anne Emanuel is a professor of law at Georgia State University who chaired the American Bar Association's Death Penalty Assessment Team for Georgia from 2004-06.