With voting day fast approaching, I’d like to remind all legal adults to mark their calendars and make a decision: to keep or kill the death penalty.

Propositions 62 and 66 are two measures on our state’s November ballot that contradict each other. While Proposition 62 is set to repeal the death penalty, Proposition 66 would keep it and even speed up the process.

As a result, the two aren’t compatible: if both are approved by a majority of voters, then the one with the most “yes” votes will override the other. Therefore, I’d primarily like to say “yes” to 62 and “no” to 66.

I don’t believe in taking an eye for an eye, or a life for a life. But aside from my own moral principles, there are consequences to Proposition 66 — a measure to speed up the death penalty’s appeals process, establish a time frame for death penalty review and appoint attorneys to death penalty cases.

A study conducted in 2014 and published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looked into the death penalty and found a shocking statistic. Out of the 7,482 death sentences handed down from 1973 to 2004 in the U.S., 1.6 percent were exonerated. That makes 117 people who took the ultimate punishment for a crime they did not commit.

So by speeding up the process, a falsely convicted “criminal” could lose his life because there simply wasn’t enough time to find the discrepancy in the case. According to Gallup, an estimated 17 percent of people opposed to the death penalty were concerned with exoneration. You can count me into that percentage.

And there is prejudice laced within the proceedings: a 2007 report sponsored by the American Bar Association concluded that a third of African-American death row inmates in Philadelphia would have been sentenced to life imprisonment if they had not been African-American.

With all that’s been said, it’s clear that the death penalty is very flawed. So in an ideal world, yes, I’d like to repeal it.

In an ideal world, we should all refrain from committing crimes that are worthy of death. If everybody followed that moral principle, the death penalty would not be necessary, and this article would not need to be written.

But that simply isn’t the case, which is why I say this: If we were to keep the death penalty, we should at least speed it up.

I know what you’re thinking: “But Harper, didn’t you say that you were opposed to the death penalty?”

That still stands. I don’t want to ignore the racial discrimination in these statistics, nor do I turn a blind eye to the innocents who’ve been essentially murdered by the government, sentenced to a crime they did not commit.

But if Proposition 62 — the measure to repeal the death penalty — doesn’t pass, then I would still like to vouch for Proposition 66. I believe these reforms are better than none.

In the state of California alone, 850 people have been sentenced to the death row since 1978. These people took the life of another human being, and as a result, someone’s brother, sister, daughter or nephew was taken from them.

However, out of those 850, only 13 have actually been executed. That leaves 837 rotting in their prisons, a punishment that many say is worse than death. As for the rest of us, it becomes clear that too many tax dollars are taken from our pockets to fund this inefficient process. This money could instead be used to better fund public schools, or the construction of roads and highways.

The death penalty is expensive and I’m sure we all know where the money comes from. A study published in 2011 revealed that the cost of the death penalty in our state has been over $4 billion since 1978. You might begin to wonder if this lengthy procedure is even worth the cost: the overcrowding of our state prisons really isn’t worth our money.

However, Proposition 66 would cut the time between sentencing and execution from 20 years to five. It would also allow those sentenced to be placed in any prison, not just on death row.

Currently, the system is not actually doing what its name projects: ending the lives of the sentenced. For now, it would be more accurate to say that it’s simply eating away at our tax dollars and taking up valuable space in our prisons.

I ask you, the reader, to be informed. If you’re of legal age to vote, I won’t force you to support or disapprove of Proposition 62. You can have your own beliefs after listening to mine.

But in the case that you vote “no” to 62, I implore you to then cast a “yes” to 66.

As always, the most important thing for you to do is to be educated on these issues before you walk into the voting booth.