With respect to an act itself (as opposed to the entity inflicting it), my trusty Webster's defines "cruel" as follows: "a: Causing or conducive to injury, grief, or pain; b: Unrelieved by leniency."

You could scarcely find a better description of capital punishment. In America, you could also add "random," "ineffective," "expensive," and "racist," and just about anywhere, you could also include "barbaric." As such, the recent spate of court decisions chipping away at how we inflict the ultimate penalty are a joyous development, an increasingly rare occasion where our governing apparatus struck a blow for what's right, as opposed to what's expedient or popular.

The most recent of these court decisions, on July 1, is both the most radical and the most likely not to stand. A federal district court judge in New York ruled that it is "fully foreseeable that in enforcing the death penalty, a meaningful number of innocent people will be executed who otherwise would eventually be able to prove their innocence."

Because executing innocent people, as undoubtedly happens, would be "cruel and unusual," Judge Jed Rakoff overturned the entire federal death penalty, affecting 27 federal inmates on death row and an additional 20 cases being pursued by Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Ashcroft has aggressively pursued the death penalty, often overruling his own prosecutors in order to seek it, and his boss made his name in part by his reckless (and callous) zeal for executions. But twice in the last month -- in one case involving states where a judge, rather than juries, decides on death sentences, and in another case involving the execution of the mentally handicapped -- the U.S. Supreme Court has struck down portions of state death penalties. Illinois and Maryland have both implemented moratoriums on their death penalty laws, again due to the risk of executing the innocent.

For this, we can thank technology. DNA testing has been responsible for the fates of many of the 101 death row inmates since 1976 -- most of them recent -- exonerated of their crimes. Many more have never been fully investigated.

The exoneration of fully half of Illinois' death row inmates by an ongoing college class project led directly to Illinois' groundbreaking moratorium.

DNA testing has generally confirmed what death penalty opponents have long claimed: our justice system is so prone to error that the death penalty inevitably kills innocents, even when there is compelling evidence to clear them.

The flood of such cases has helped to shift what was once overwhelming public support for executions, but they're still popular. For many advocates, the potential innocence of those already convicted is irrelevant. We kill people in this country because we want to; it's about vengeance. an eye for an eye, retaliating for what genuinely are horrific crimes. The point is not just to provide "closure" for victims' families (it almost never does), but to send a broader message to the public: we killed the creep. That message, advocates feel (and are occasionally honest enough to say), outweighs the negatives of killing a few innocents here and there. Even in the New York ruling, note Judge Rakoff's language: "a meaningful number" of innocent people. At some point in the cost-benefit analysis, the number of innocents presumably becomes too high; Rakoff merely changed our interpretation of that number a bit.

That's a major reason why Congress and many states have in recent years gutted the appeals process, habeas corpus, and the ability of inmates to introduce exonerating evidence to a court after their sentencing. All of these safeguards have been made much more difficult, or abolished entirely, in an effort to "streamline executions." They have contributed to a climate where it is probable that we are, by Judge Rakoff's standards, killing "too many" innocent people.

In the end, most of the legal wrangling -- the Supreme Court's abolition of the death penalty in 1972, the reinstatement in 1976, all of the state court and legislative battles since then, and some of the more recent court decisions as well -- come down to the fateful constitutional words barring "cruel and unusual punishment."

Recent court decisions have been an artful political compromise, between what's popular and what's right. They've given new hope to inmates and reinvigorated the opposition. But none of this legal hair-splitting speaks to the basic, underlying problem with the death penalty: if killing people is wrong, having the government kill people is wrong, too. In many ways, as a premeditated, publicly funded spectacle, the death penalty is even worse than the crimes it purports to prevent.

It really does reduce to the old bumper sticker: Why do we kill people to show people that killing people is wrong? Ultimately, our courts must do what legislators apparently cannot bring themselves to. The death penalty must be abolished.