We have previously expressed our ambivalence about the death penalty, questioning its benefit to society, especially its ability to deter people from committing the most heinous acts.

But our position has hardened against the death penalty for two reasons — Leon Brown and Henry McCollum. That is why we find disappointing movement in the General Assembly to again begin executions in this state after a nine-year lull that resulted because of concerns of how North Carolina put people to death.

You must know Brown and McCollum’s story, but if you don’t: The half-brothers were black teenagers, McCollum, 19, and Brown just 15, and with very low IQs when they were charged with raping and then strangling to death 11-year-old Sabrina Buie in Red Springs on Sept. 24, 1983.

Although there was never direct evidence linking them to Buie, investigators say they confessed, and both were convicted of rape and murder and sentenced to death. Brown’s sentence was commuted to life when a 1992 re-trial cleared him of Buie’s murder but not of rape.

Both had spent three decades in prison when the work of North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission demonstrated their likely innocence through the discovery of DNA evidence, which was unavailable at the time of Buie’s murder and the half-brothers’ conviction. Both walked out of prison late last year as grown men, have since been pardoned by Gov. Pat McCrory and are eligible for reparations, but their lives can never be fully rehabilitated.

Except that this state’s judicial system moves so slowly and clumsily when executing people, both McCollum and Brown might have met that fate — and the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission would never have engaged, demonstrating their innocence while pointing the finger at the man who most likely raped and killed Buie.

Certainly Brown and McCollum aren’t the first to be wrongly sentenced to death, and who can know how many others who were innocent didn’t live long enough to be exonerated.

But this week the state Senate will resume debate on legislation that exempts executions from state requirements for the public rule-making process, which would allow officials to find new drugs for lethal injections and executions could resume.

Despite Brown and McCollum’s case, we could be convinced of the worthiness of the death penalty if there were any evidence that it is a deterrent, if there wasn’t evidence that it is used arbitrarily with race playing an important factor, and if it were only applied in the most gruesome of crimes when guilt isn’t in doubt.

Those are high bars that will never be cleared.

The United States is among only about 50 countries that continue with the death penalty, and many of them use it sparingly or almost never. It is not good company we are keeping, with Iran, Saudi Arabia, China, Iraq and Libya to name just some. For the period of 2007 to 2012, this country executed twice as many people as did North Korea, perhaps the most brutal regime in the world.

North Carolina last carried out an execution in 2006, and there are now 148 people on death row in this state. But even if the march to the death chamber resumes and all 148 of these people are ultimately executed, no one in this state will be a bit safer. If there is any satisfaction, it can only be found in vengeance.

We hope senators this week, while debating, will keep fresh in their minds what happened to McCollum and Brown. If their story in someway brings an end to executions in North Carolina, then their lives will have been given a meaning that seemed impossible in 1984 when they were falsely convicted and placed in a cell to await death that only good luck kept from coming.