"Society kills people when it is justified," Slavitt said. "Society has the right to take life, the question is, when?"
Rubenstein and Lambert gave statistics showing that poor minority defendants receive the death penalty overwhelmingly more than wealthy white ones.
Though Slavitt agreed that no system could be designed to completely eliminate mistakes, he asked whether this was reason enough to eliminate capital punishment.
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He credited death penalty opponents for valuing the life of wrongly executed prisoners, but pointed out that society must not overlook the crime's victim.
"The only way we as a society can value the life of a victim...is to say 'you cannot live under the same sky that we live under,'" Slavitt said.