Among the changes in state law being considered by New Hampshire legislators in the session that started this week is one that, if passed, would repeal the death penalty.

The state hasn’t executed anyone since 1939.

We have just one death row inmate, Michael Addison, who was convicted in the 2006 shooting death of Manchester police officer Michael Briggs.

New Hampshire is one of 32 states that allow the death penalty, though we are something of an island in that regard in New England. None of the other states in the region put people to death, and Pennsylvania is the nearest state to us that does.

New Hampshire expanded the death penalty in 2011 to include murders committed during a home invasion, a response to the horrific Mont Vernon murder of Kimberly Cates in 2009.

We understand the desire for vengance, especially in the wake of particularly heinous crimes like the one in Mont Vernon that strike at the core of our very sense of what it means to be human and live in a civilized culture.

Nobody would blame state Rep. Renny Cushing, D-Hampton, for wanting vengance after he watched his father get gunned down in the doorway of the family home in 1988. Yet, Cushing has long been a death penalty opponent and is the prime sponsor of the bill to repeal it in New Hampshire.

The death penalty debate is one with a lot of angles, but the best reason we can think of to favor its repeal boils down to this: It is a punishment administered by humans to other humans, and humans make too many mistakes. It is a virtual certainty that we have executed innocent people over the years. Probably a lot of them, judging from the number of death row inmates who have had their convictions overturned – 130 – and been freed since the 1970s. That’s about 10 percent of the number that we have executed since that time.

Is that an acceptable number? Are we, as a society, OK with executing a few innocents in exchange for a blanket policy that allows us to kill those who kill others?

Send someone to prison for the rest of their life and you at least have the option of releasing them if evidence turns up later that proves they were innocent of the crime for which they were convicted.

But putting somebody to death is an act that leaves absolutely no margin for error. People have survived skydiving accidents, and we once beat the odds and rescued three astronauts from the vacuum of space. We have a pretty good track record, as a species, for leaving ourselves a litle wiggle room. Death is the exception we have not yet conquered.

The death penalty is an example of a society playing Russian roulette. The longer a death-penalty law stays on the books and the more it is enforced, the more likely it is that a state will kill someone who is not only not guilty, but actually innocent.

We think that’s a good enough reason to repeal the death penalty in New Hampshire.

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