I'm pro.

I think Nader sums it up for me.

"The death penalty has been shown, in study after study, not to deter homicides; it has been shown to be discriminatorily applied to the poor and the defenseless, especially defendants who don’t have lawyers who stay awake at trial."

Also, most democratic countries today have abolished the death penalty, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, almost all of Europe, and much of Latin America.

It would cost way less to execute people if we just shot them.

I'm only for it in cases of mental retardation.

I ain't fer it, I agin it.

Against.

Yeah, guys like Gacy, Gein and Lucas need to go down, but those sort of types don't come up so often.

Drug offenses are out of hand, used to pad stats, without actually addressing any problem.

There is too little attempt at reform in the corrections systems. Sorry, Joe Arpaio, your pink panties and striped uniforms don't work. Especially on guys awaiting trial.

I'm sure there is some racial and economic disparity, but I'm not sold on the extent. The University of Maryland recently released a study showing huge income gaps and racial gaps in application of death sentence cases.

Thing is though, Baltimore City and Prince George's County, the two most crime addled parts of the state, attempt very few death sentences. The more affluent and relatively safer areas are more likely to seek the death penalty, so if there is a black defendant it appears to be racially or economically motivated, but it's not necessarily so.

There's way too much room for error in the application of the death sentence. Let 'em sit in prison.

actually, no, it doesnt. i read in a reputable magazine a few years ago (time, iirc), that it costs 10 times as much (200,000 to keep someone in prison for life, 2,000,000 to execute them) to execute someone in the state of florida, because there can be years and years of appeals that tie up courts.

It's retarded. end of story.

i am in favor of the death penalty.

I don't think it should be abolished completely, but it should be applied far less often. It should only be applied in those instances in which the only way to protect the public against someone with absolutely zero chance of rehabilitating (the hardcore serial killers mentioned earlier in this thread, for example) would be to execute them, as were they to escape, further atrocities/deaths would certainly be perpetrated by them.

But like Cory said, such cases are very, very rare, which is why the death penalty is used way too much as it stands today. I also agree with those who have citied incompetence on the part of public defenders as a compelling reason against routine utilization of the death penalty.

One facet that I have never heard discussed is the value of capital punishment as leverage in getting criminals to cooperate with law enforcement.

There was an article today about some gang leader in Detroit who's going to sing like a canary in order to avoid the death penalty.

i think it should be abolished. i pretty much agree with elvis fu's reasoning above. its guilty beyond a reasonable doubt...but death leaves very little room for doubt. plus I just don't know if the state should be getting involved in killing prisoners.

Against. But boo hoo if you don't have a flush toilet.

Why are still the only Western country with it? I'm against, simply because they numbers don't lie. As said above, it doesn't deter at all.

I didn't even realize I had responded to this and almost replied a second time.

It would have been awesome if you would have argued the opposite view unknowingly.

I'm surprised I didn't post on this one earlier. I'm against it, but I know I would probably want the person dead if they killed someone in my family. From my rational perspective, I just don't see how we can execute anyone without concrete proof and a completely fair trial. Texas, who leads the nation in executions has one of the worst public defender systems and does not provide DNA testing for defendants who want to use it for their Defense.
Until everyone is guaranteed a fair trial and they can prove they won't execute an innocent man, they probably shouldn't kill anyone. Plus, most states don't have near the crime nor murder rates to justify it. The last few people executed in Nebraska were clearly not high profile criminals, except for possibly John Jubert. Charles Starkweather seems to be the only person in this state to ever fit the bill for Capital Punishment.

That's totally something I would do.

it's folks like this that should be put to death...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/engl ... 599524.stm

In manner so cruel and unusual it would make hardened murderers cry, and on LIVE TELEVISION.

totally against. death is different from any other punishment. it has a permanent result that demands a perfect level of certainty that our legal system can't ever achieve. not to mention that in practice, it's racist as fuck--asking a jury to make judgments about the value of a person's life is an invitation for biased decisionmaking.
i'm curious as to how the people who are in favor of it think of all the cases where death row inmates have later been exonerated by dna evidence.

I also think 99.9% of people who say, "If someone harmed someone I love, well, I'd just kill them myself" are…

A. Full of horseshit, and likely a gigantic pussy. The 0.1% of people who would do this sort of thing are most likely already in jail or on probation/parole of some sort.

B. No better than the guy who committed the original crime.

opposed

you don't think that simply jailing them would be worse? You KNOW how pedophiles get it. These guys would be flayed and used for armchairs.