Imagine you are a criminal awaiting your execution. You are about to receive a lethal injection consisting of three drugs: one to anesthetize you, one to paralyze you and one to stop your heart. But at the fateful moment, something goes wrong — the first drug, sodium thiopental, has not been administered in the proper amount. The second drug comes and you feel agonizing, unbearable pain, but there is nothing you can do — you are unable even to cry out. You have no choice but to sit and wait for the awful end.

This is the prospect raised by two inmates on death row in Kentucky, who challenged the method of lethal injection employed by that state and most others. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court, which yesterday upheld the method’s constitutionality and rejected the notion that an error in the injection process would represent the “cruel and unusual punishment” prohibited by the Eighth Amendment.

We regret the Court’s decision, just as we regret the existence of the death penalty in our legal system in the first place. We do not believe that any society has the right to decree death for any of its members, however heinous his or her crime. But we also recognize that the death penalty is not going away anytime soon, and it is therefore of the utmost importance that our government strives to make an inhumane act as humane as possible.

Several states have acknowledged the risks posed by Kentucky’s method of execution, and have taken steps to avoid them with “elementary” measures that are “simple and essentially costless to employ,” in the words of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

There is no good rationale for a failure to take these most basic precautions when putting a person to death. In the interests of strengthening the footing of the death penalty in this country, the justices voting to uphold Kentucky’s method seem to have adopted a position of willful ignorance regarding the consequences of error in the injection process.

This attitude only underscores the need for a new president who will put a stop to the Court’s tilt towards the right on many social issues, taking advantage of the probable impending retirements of Justice John Paul Stevens and others to appoint justices more amenable to the humane treatment of criminals. Perhaps Stevens put it best yesterday, even as he concurred with the opinion out of respect for precedent. In his statement, Stevens quoted Justice Byron White, who argued more than 30 years ago that the death penalty represents “the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes.” One day, we hope, our country and its justices will see this conclusion as simply self-evident.