Although polls show a majority of North Carolinians support a moratorium, policy-makers should know that one is not necessary. Capital punishment experts already know well the problems that plague death penalty practice here and nation-wide.

I've just completed a study of scholarly experts on capital punishment -- people who have long taught and conducted research about the death penalty -- and they overwhelmingly oppose the penalty, call for its abolition and favor alternatives that include life imprisonment without parole.

The experts offer three main reasons for their opposition.

First, the death penalty fails to achieve its goals of retribution, deterrence and incapacitation. Because killings so rarely lead to an execution in the United States, capital punishment does not achieve justice for society or for relatives of murder victims, does not sufficiently scare would-be murderers and does not kill enough murderers to have any impact on the murder rate.

Nationally, between 1977 and 2005 there were 575,437 murders and non-negligent homicides. These led to only 6,934 death sentences and 1,004 executions. Thus, only 1.2 percent of the killings led to death sentences, and only 0.17 percent have resulted in an execution so far.

From 1977 to 2005, North Carolina averaged only 14.5 death sentences and 1.6 executions per year, in spite of suffering approximately 594 murders annually. The rarity of the death penalty is precisely why it is so ineffective and inefficient.

Second, the application of the death penalty in the United States is plagued by significant biases based on race, social class and gender.

Killers of whites are far more likely to be executed than killers of blacks -- regardless of the race of the killer -- but especially when the killer is black and the victim is white. Further, virtually every person on death row is poor, consistent with evidence that what determines who gets executed is not the heinousness of the crime but the quality of the defense. And citizens in every state with capital punishment are remarkably squeamish about executing women.

Third, there is a serious risk that capital punishment will be used against the factually innocent. Not only do we know that 113 people have been released from death row since 1977 (including three from North Carolina), some believe that states have recently executed innocent people. Clear cases of innocence have emerged in Texas, Missouri and Florida.

The North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission, established last year, will likely catch some wrongful convictions, but it is unrealistic to expect it to discover them all.

Judged by any standard, the death penalty is a failed policy. It fails to meet its goals, and the costs clearly outweigh the modest benefits.

Death penalty supporters may react with a call for more executions. Logically, that would make capital punishment more effective at achieving retribution, deterrence and incapacitation. But the reality is that prosecutors are not willing to seek the punishment, juries are not willing to impose it and counties and states are unwilling to pay the enormous costs to carry out the death penalty with greater frequency.

For every execution in North Carolina, taxpayers must pay more than $2 million above the costs of a life sentence. This is an enormous waste of resources that could be invested in crime prevention strategies that would save lives.

The right thing to do is to end executions once and for all.

Twelve states and the District of Colombia already live without the death penalty; only nine of 29 states with the penalty have carried out at least one execution per year since 1977 (only one of those -- Texas -- averaged more than four executions per year); and the United States is the only Western industrialized country still using capital punishment. These facts show that the punishment is one we could easily live without.

The General Assembly should abolish capital punishment. It is ineffective, inefficient, plagued by serious problems and unfixable.

(Matthew Robinson is associate professor of criminal justice at Appalachian State University and author of "Death Nation: The Experts Explain American Capital Punishment," to be published in March.)