New Hampshire lawmakers have been asked to expand the death penalty to cover crimes like that of Michael Woodbury, the Maine man who killed three people in an Army Navy store in Conway last July.

Was Woodbury's crime worse than the alleged crime of John "Jay" Brooks, the millionaire charged with hiring hit men to kidnap and kill someone he believed had stolen from him? Was it worse than the alleged crime of Michael Addison, charged with killing a Manchester police officer? Brooks and Addison face the death penalty. Woodbury, who pleaded guilty, did not.

Because he did not commit one of the six offenses punishable by death under New Hampshire law, he is serving life without parole.

It's logical to argue that if a state sanctions death as the punishment for certain offenses, the penalty should apply to multiple murders. But the death penalty should be eliminated, not expanded.

Lawmakers should consider a sentence written by lawyer and legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin in an article in the current issue of The New Yorker on efforts to try Brian Nichols, who killed four people in a Georgia crime spree:

"The Nichols case illustrates a troubling paradox in death-penalty jurisprudence: The more heinous a crime - and the more incontrovertible the evidence of a defendant's guilt - the greater the cost of the defense may be." Now substitute the name Woodbury for Nichols.

Nichols's defense has cost his state $1.2 million and consumed all the funds set aside for defense of the state's indigents. No jury has been seated, nor may one ever be. Georgia has refused to pay more to defend Nichols. As a result, he may never get the death penalty.

The high price of death penalty cases and their impact on the judicial system is not the biggest reason to oppose capital punishment. It is just one of many reasons.

It is extremely difficult to impose the death penalty fairly. Justice, unfortunately, is not always blind to the color of a defendant's skin or the size of his bank account. Witnesses can be mistaken, informants can lie, police and prosecutors can overlook evidence that may exonerate a suspect, juries can be swayed by emotion. So many things can go wrong. That's one reason New Hampshire has not put anyone to death in nearly 70 years.

More than 200 U.S. inmates, including some on death row, have been exonerated by DNA evidence since 1989. The intense examinations of cases by just one Northwestern University journalism professor, David Protess, and his students have led to the release of 10 prisoners, including five innocent men on death row. The law and the humans who apply it are simply too fallible to fairly levy the death penalty.

Capital punishment should also be abolished because it is counterproductive. It does nothing to deter people from committing murder, but it simultaneously sends the message that, under circumstances other than war or defense of oneself or another, it is permissible to kill another human being.

Expanding the death penalty to apply to more offenses will not reduce the murder rate. Making killing a cultural taboo so heinous that society doesn't impose it on the worst of criminals, might.