I Want Everyone's Opinion on This...

[A Black Falcon]

No way. That is the entire problem with the death penalty in that there are so many cases of the courts getting it wrong even after all of those appeals. I did a report on the death penalty back in my senior year of high school fully expecting to build a good case to support keeping the death penalty, but what I found really surprised me. ABF is right about death row costing much more than life in prison; it isn't even close. Maximum security prison is certainly not a place anyone would want to go and I'm sure there aren't too many lifetime-sentenced inmates who are really happy they didn't get the death penalty after sitting in prison for a few years knowing they are spending the rest of their lives there.

Agreed on all major points. Death row allows FAR, FAR more appeals... they go on for years, often decades. Not true for normal inmates. And as I said costs are significantly higher for those inmates. I know I have read that death row is a lot more expensive than life. Surprising? Yeah, until you consider how expensive all those extra hearings and legal proceedings are and how death row is a special and more expensive part of the prison system...

And also (repeating again) the position that life in a maximum security prison is easy... so absurd... it flies in the face of everything I've ever heard about prisons...

And as I said life without parole is a worse punishment than death! Death ends it faster... life they spend a long time being miserable. No comparison really.

I disagree. I think once someone kills, he declares he's not willing to play within the same set of rules as the rest of humanity, so we should treat him that way.

No matter what an individual thinks, what is moral does not change. It is not moral to kill. Now with self-defence you have a excuse, but with this? There is none. And it is not moral to compromise human rights for vengeance (deny that that's what it is Weltall, but that's really the only case for the death penalty as opposed to life without parole...). Slobodan Milosevich may spit on the Balkans War Crimes tribunal in The Hague, but that doesn't mean that we can spit on it too and just get rid of him. We need to uphold what is right! Killing people does the opposite.

Let's take Osama Bin Laden. Obviously a very, very evil man. But I wouldn't support killing him, or 'accidentally' shooting him if we capture him alive, or something like that. He may hate democracy and everything about our way of life but to me that doesn't mean that we can too... resorting to a peremptory and partial tribunal and a quick death sentence is NOT upholding our Constitution or our moral responsibilities as citizens of a country supposedly founded on law and morality (see the Declaration of Independence...).

Now it is true that like everything else what is "right" changes over time. We cannot base our morality on the morality of the past... and, to me and to many other people, like the citizens of Europe, capital punishment is a old type of judgement that does not hold up when we look at it from a modern view of what is right.