In two days, Missouri will kill a man convicted of murder during a botched robbery in 1998.

The execution of Earl Ringo Jr. will be Missouri’s eighth of the year, putting it in a tie with Texas for most in 2014. Missouri, Texas and Florida currently share a three-way lead, but both Missouri and Texas have executions scheduled for Sept. 10.

Missouri’s latest execution, which will be its 78th in the last 38 years, comes on the heels of a report by St. Louis Public Radio that the director of the Department of Corrections, George Lombardi, lied about use of an agonizing execution drug. The drug, called Midazolam, has led to slow and painful deaths lasting as long as 1 1/2 hours. It took that time when used in Arizona on inmate Joseph Wood, who made sounds “similar to when a swimming-pool filter starts taking in air” and “gulped like a fish on land,” wrote a reporter who witnessed the death.

Missouri, meanwhile, has included Midazolam in lethal cocktails for its last nine executions, according to the report.

The scheduled execution of Ringo will also take place a week after North Carolina exonerated an innocent man on Death Row after he and another innocent “accomplice” wasted 30 years in prison. Police reportedly coerced signed confessions out of the two men, who were convicted of raping and murdering an 11-year-old girl.

The potentially wrongful death of one person—amidst the existence of numerous available alternatives for punishment or rehabilitation—would seem to negate arguments supporting the death penalty. A pattern of painful and prolonged executions only bolsters the case. Then there’s the socioeconomically and racially discriminatory manner in which people are sentenced to die. Henry Lee McCollum and Leon Brown, the two innocent North Carolina men, were poor and black, leaving them fewer resources to defend against police intimidation and a criminal justice system biased in favor of the richer and the whiter. To boot, McCollum and Brown have intellectual disabilities and were both teenagers at the time of the crime (McCollum was 19 and Brown only 15).

Nationwide, capital punishment has proved cruel and unusual, yet the system of state-sanctioned killing presses forward. Our state of Missouri is the region’s ground zero for miscarriage of justice.

Rather than learning from past horror stories about the death penalty and trying to do away with grisly and medieval punishment, Missouri keeps looking for creative ways to preserve it. Last year, Attorney General Chris Koster threatened to bring the gas chamber back while Missouri faced a shortage of lethal drugs. Return of the gas chamber sure could serve as an ode to state tradition, since the machines carried out nearly 40 executions from 1938 to 1965. Yes, that time frame coincides with the start, middle and end of the Holocaust and 20 years after.

Earlier this year, state Republicans introduced a bill calling for firing squads to do the trick of killing.

Thankfully, Missouri is for now only turning to Midazolam—if a drug that causes gulping like a fish, convulsing and eventually still dying is something for which we should be thankful. The death penalty is wrong under any circumstance in a modern criminal justice system, and public officials from both sides of the aisle keep defending it anyway.

Governor Jay Nixon, a Democrat, has granted clemency to only one death row inmate in his six years as governor. He routinely denies the opportunity to commute death sentences to life sentences behind bars, and he refuses to make reforming capital punishment a priority.

While America’s addiction to mass incarceration spirals out of control, reliance on the death penalty does the same. Instead of finding rehabilitation for petty criminals, we throw them behind bars. When the prisons are too crowded, we have no option for the truly despicable criminals other than murder sponsored by a democratic government. One shudders to think how many people killed by the state were not even guilty in the first place.

According to the legal information presented, which is always questionable no matter how foolproof it may seem, Ringo was responsible for the deaths of two people. When Ringo dies on Wednesday, he will merely be a third body on the tally. There will be no redeeming value and certainly no constitutionality.