Here are two facts about Colorado's Gov. Bill Owens: (1) he's a man of talent, character and integrity; and (2) his thinking about the death penalty is seriously wrong.

Consider the following.

Earlier this month, the outgoing governor of Illinois, George Ryan, took the extraordinary step of pardoning four death row inmates outright and commuting all of the remaining 167 inmates to terms of life imprisonment or less. Ryan explained his actions by saying that, "My goal was to stop innocent people (from) being murdered by the state. We almost executed 12 (or) 13 innocent people. We had a system that didn't work."

Ryan's comments could easily be applied to the justice system in many other states. Typically, if a defendant is financially well off and white, he has a much lower chance of receiving the death penalty than if he's poor or a person of color. Across the country, wrongly convicted men and women have almost certainly been executed for years.

Ryan acknowledged that the flaws in Illinois' death penalty machinery had become too grave to ignore. In exercising his power of clemency, he acted well within his rights of office — and even more importantly, he did the right thing.

As the Illinois Catholic Conference observed, "The death of a murderer cannot bring back the one who has been killed, nor does revenge help to heal the hole in the heart of the grieving loved ones."

Quite apart from the flaws built into the death penalty in too many states, capital punishment simply doesn't work as a deterrent, and doesn't heal or redress any wounds. It does succeed though in answering violence with violence — a violence wrapped in the piety of state approval, which involves all of us as citizens in the taking of more lives.

Turning away from capital punishment does not diminish our support for the families of murder victims. They bear a terrible burden of grief. Real murderers deserve real punishment, but even murderers retain their God-given dignity as human beings. When we take a murderer's life we only add to the violence in an already violent culture, and we demean our own dignity in the process. Moreover, we don't need to do it. In the United States in 2003, murderers can be punished and public safety can be secured without strapping a single human being to an execution gurney.

Which brings us back to Gov. Bill Owens.

Here in Colorado, we have five men sitting on death row. In a Jan. 13 debate with George Ryan on national television, Gov. Owens described the kind of clemency Ryan granted as "an abuse of power" and suggested that, "in Colorado, we have a very good system. The people who are on death row . . . deserve to be there."

We've reached a strange place in American history if mercy is now an abuse of power. And I wish I had the governor's confidence that our capital justice system is "very good" — but I don't.

Gov. Owens is a good man. But he's wrong on the death penalty, and that has consequences for us all. As the men on death row move closer to execution, he has the power to ennoble or diminish Coloradans by his decisions on clemency.

We should begin to pray, now, that he makes the right choice. And we should redouble our efforts, now, to change the law.