This is a topic I feel strongly about, so I am actually going to say somnething serious for a change:

I don't believe in the death penalty under any circumstances, for any crime. Some of my reasons are outlined below:

1) It doesn't undo the crime. It merely means that that individual cannot do anything else, right or wrong.

There is a great assumption in this thread that murderers / rapists / whatever can only be prevented from committing more crimes by killing them. Statistics demonstrate that most serious crimes are one-offs, and unlikely to be repeated.

2) If someone is wrongly convicted, they cannot be un-executed.

The last execution in Britain was almost 50 years ago now. His family are still campaining to have his name cleared.

In the last few years, 10 people sentanced to life imprisonment or terrorist bombings (the Guildford 4 and the Birmingham 6) have been relesed after it turned out the police evidence wasn't as strong as it had seemed.

Quite simply, if you are going to have a death penalty, you need to be able to guarantee a 100% accuracy rate. Either that or accept that the occassional (or not so occassional, perhaps) dead innocent is acceptable.

Who here believes that Texas's justice system is 100% reliable?

3) Prisons have a responsibility to rehabilitate criminals.

This is really a gripe with the prison system as a whole (both British and US, and probably everywhere else), rather than the death penalty specifically. At present, criminals go to prison and the only thing they learn is a better way to pick a lock.

In short, I believe that prisons are concentrating on punishment (which is an important factor) to the exclusion of all else. Prisons keep criminals away from society when they should be turning criminals into people that you would be happy to live next door to.

4) The death penalty does not discourage people from commiting capital crimes, any more than any other penalty. McVeigh didn't worry about it. NOr will the next one.

Although, come to think of it, Britain currently has the death penalty for 2 crimes: high treason and piracy with violence. I don't remember either of these having come to light in the last 100 years. Maybe there is a link. Or then again...

5) Somewhere down the line, someone has the power to kill people. I can imagine mass-murderers across the US thinking "I wish I was Governer of Texas - then I could kill lots of people legally".

OK, so I'm picking on Texas a little bit, but of the 38 (I think) States with capital punishment, Texas accounts for half the executions. Significantly more than that while Bush was there.

From a trans-Atlantic viewpoint, it seems that the US has elected someone who would, under other circumstances, be considered a mass murderer.

That last is slightly off topic, but hey. I have other reasons but that's all I can put to paper at the moment.

Admittedly, living in a country with no death penalty may skew my opinions slightly. But I do feel very strongly about this.

winter"Heh. A post I actually mean. That's a first"mute