The recent execution of an Arizona man should have lasted 10 minutes, but instead he spent nearly two hours snorting and gasping before the injections killed him. Last week Joseph Rudolph Wood, 55, became the third convict this year to undergo a botched execution.

Senator John McCain called Wood’s execution “torture.” Medical personnel confirmed he was comatose during the entire process, but that doesn’t hide the fact that the U.S. killed a human being at the institutional level.

This country has executed 26 people this year, according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center. So what should we have to say about those other 25 cases? Are they not also appalling?

Simply put, capital punishment is wrong, and yet it’s legal in 32 states.

Consider the “Harry Potter” scene in which Nearly Headless Nick pulls back his head to reveal a bloody stump of a neck. That scene would be equally horrific if he were Properly Beheaded Nick.

Execution isn’t our only option. Life in prison without parole would keep the public just as safe, far fewer religions take issue with this sentence, and it’s less expensive.

The death penalty costs about four times more than other punishments, according to a study by the Kansas Judicial Council that took place from 2004 to 2011. Defense costs for a single death penalty case averaged $395,762. Compare that to the $98,963 it costs to deal with offenders in another way.

In 2011 Judge Arthur Alarcón and Paula Mitchell, a professor at Loyola Law School, calculated that if all death row inmates in California were instead sentenced to life without parole, the state would save $170 million per year.

Botched executions are not a new occurrence. Several inmates who underwent prolonged electrocutions in the ‘80s began smoking or caught fire before dying. Since then we obviously haven’t perfected a quick or painless method of execution.

It’s wrong to inflict so much pain on people, regardless of how much one thinks they deserve it.

Understandably, it’s hard to see people on death row as human beings. Joseph Wood did terrible things – he shot and killed his ex-girlfriend and her father, smiling as he pulled the trigger. Wood was a bad guy and deserved the harshest of punishments, but institutional murder is not our right.

The worst we can rightfully do is lock up inmates and throw away the key, leaving them to dwell on their actions.