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What about the executors?By your logic the executor should also be executed,right?And soldiers?Do soldiers not deserve to be treated like humans?And the death sentence can be just as costly.Prisoners are often on death row for years before they're executed,waiting for appeals,that costs.Don't get me wrong,certain criminals definitely deserve to be executed,but isn't it hypocritical to kill someone for killing?

I don't know what prisons are like in America,but in Britain criminals have colour TVs,games consoles,menus for meals,an allowance to spend on luxuries and all sorts of mod cons in their cells that a lot of law-abiding people in the real world can't afford.They get a life of idleness and luxury for being criminals!I think hard labour would be a better bet,get them doing something constructive!But that's irrelevant to the argument at hand.

Back to the point,I've done some research on murder rates so as to re-validate my argument.These are murder rates per 100,000 people in various states.I'll start with those without the death penalty.I won't put them all here,cos that'd take too long.These figures are for 2009.
Iowa - 1.1
Maine - 2.0
Massachusetts - 2.6
Michigan - 6.3
Minnesota - 1.4
North Dakota - 1.5
New Jersey - 3.7
Rhode Island - 2.9
Vermont - 1.1
Now these are those with the death penalty.
Alabama - 6.9
Arizona - 5.4
Arkansas - 6.2
Idaho - 1.4
Illinois - 6.0
Louisiana - 11.8
Maryland - 7.7
New Hampshire 0.8
Tennessee - 7.3
The national averages for 2009:
Non death penalty states - 2.8
Death penalty states - 5.2
There are some exceptions,like New Hampshire has the lowest of all states,but those with the death penalty have consistently higher murder rates than those without.

Sorry for the double post,but by certain criminals that deserve to be executed I'm talking those that rape and kill children in particular,but also just those that rape and kill.Society could do without these "people"

"Morality is not about consequences; it is about principle."

However,
For those of you who disagree with this statement:


I'd like to question what the death penalty actually achieves...

-the criminal achieves nothing; he/she loses his/her life.
-the state/taxpayer loses out; the death penalty costs far more than life imprisonment (by "life", I mean the duration of a prisoner's life, not a set amount of time)
-the public are not kept safer by capital punishment; whether the criminal is executed or kept behind bars for life, they are still unable to reach the public
-the victims (or the families of the victims) do not benefit; studies have shown that such victims or families do not actually feel any better if the criminal is killed. And, even if the death penality did help them to feel better, I would still suggest that this is not a morally acceptable argument as it is, to me, simply revenge.
-it is debatable whether or not capital punishment is a good deterrent. As someone posted earlier, murder rates are significantly higher in US states that do practice the death penalty. However, you could argue that this is simply a correlation and that cause and effect cannot, therefore, be inferred.


For those of you concerned with morality and principle:

I think that forgiveness - however hard it may be - is the ideal response for a victim (or their family), and perhaps life imprisonment and/or character building labour for the criminal. "The justice system should aim to rehabilitate, rather than to punish." Some might argue that capital punishment is retributive justice. However, like I said, I simply see it as vengeance - which, btw, I strongly disagree with.

Also, it is rather hypocritical of an authority to prohibit killing, and then use killing as a method to enforce this. Although I accept that hypocrisy is not a logical flaw, this still seems ethically wrong to me.


For those of you who still support capital punishment:

Are you happy to sentence an innocent person to death? I can't be bothered to type it out again, so I'm just going to copy and paste a post I made on another forum...

"However much evidence you have that someone has committed a crime, you can still never know that they did it. You will never have absolute proof.
A person's life is a high price... however small the possibility is, every time someone is executed we are running the risk of killing an innocent person. And this has happened many, many times in the past. Let me try and explain this differently....

Now I know this is generalising massively, but let's assume we are the judge sentencing someone to A- death, or B- life imprisonment. There are four possibilities: we have them executed and they are Aa- guilty, or Ab- innocent; we have them imprisoned for life and they are Ba- guilty, or Bb- innocent.

If we select A, then we are running the risk of Ab. The chance of Ab happening over Aa may be small, but this is (in my opinion) outweighed by the severity of the wrong we will have committed with Ab.
B is less extreme - even if Bb is true, we may find this out later and release them i.e. it is undoable. Perhaps more importantly, though, it is less severe in the first place: we are not depriving the convicted person of their "right" to life.


For me, however, this is rather irrelevant- even if we are 100% certain that our man is guilty, who are we to judge our fellow human beings? What guarantee do we have that we will judge fairly; justly? Surely only God, in His perfection, can truly judge fairly. "

Believe it should be used, especially for very nasty crimes.