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The following is a recent editorial from the Arizona Republic

Arthur Martin Ross wanted to kill himself and we agreed to help, but since assisted suicide is illegal here we strapped him to a table last week and shot him full of poison and called it an execution.

Hardly anybody noticed.

It was the 3rd death sentence carried out this year in Arizona and the 11th since 1992, when we reinstituted the practice of occasionally killing a killer.

Ross was 43 and had been convicted of luring 26-year-old real estate agent James Ruble to a vacant Tucson office and shooting him in the head while robbing him. Ruble was, by all accounts, a wonderful young man with a bright future. He was murdered for no good reason.

There never is. Hundreds of people are killed here every year. Anyone connected to any of those victims can tell you there's never a good reason.

In turn, whenever a killer is executed, prosecutors and politicians say the sentence needed to be carried out in order to demonstrate our respect for victims.

It sounds good, but makes no sense.

Only a handful of the killers who go through the system and are declared guilty get the death penalty.

We can talk all we want about mitigating circumstances, aggravating circumstances, premeditation and the rest, but in the end we're left with victims, killers and wildly differing degrees of punishment.

There are only 2 possible explanations for this.

Either we're under the mistaken impression that 1 victim can be more valuable than another; or we simply don't have the stomach to kill every person who takes a life.

In order to do so, we'd have to execute roughly a person per day, putting us in the same league with less retributively squeamish places like Iran, China, Iraq and Texas.

But that's not what we do.

Juries and judges and prosecutors don't always choose death. Even when they do, the appeals process takes time, no matter how impatient the supporters of capital punishment become.

Then, along comes Arthur Martin Ross. He could have put off his execution by at least 3 more years simply by saying he wanted to continue to appeal. Instead, he decided he'd rather die.

At the state Attorney General's Office, they call condemned inmates like Ross "volunteers." They want to die sooner rather than later, and we decide to give them what they want.

But why?

Why bother to stage an elaborate ceremony when all we need to do is hand them back their belts and shoelaces?

Why let him choose?

Why let a killer choose the punishment he considers less painful?

There's no good explanation, because there's no civilized way to do it. Even when we convince ourselves it's justified. Capital punishment itself is doomed because it answers no questions.

It only raises them.

Why is the death penalty not equally applied?

Why do we get all worked up about some executions while others pass with hardly anybody noticing?

Why can't the most ardent supporters of execution remember the name of Arthur Martin Ross's victim -- right now -- without looking back in this article?

Why can't they name any of the victims of the 11 murderers put to death since we started executing people again?

On the night Ross was put to death, Assistant Attorney General Joe Maziarz said, "We've agreed if he changes his mind any time up until the time of execution we will allow him to pursue his appeals and stop the execution."

Ross was in charge.

When asked if he had any last words, he answered, "Nah."

He had nothing to say because he had nothing to prove. Strapped to a gurney and on his way to hell, the killer was more in control of his fate than many people on the outside. He didn't even need Kevorkian. He had something better. He had us.