Connecticut abolishes the Death penalty

The deterrence argument does not work. Amnesty USA have a good site for this info:Death Penalty Facts – Amnesty International USAAside from the plain fact that it doesn't deter (for the obvious reasons that most murders aren't premeditated and those that are are done by people who do not believe they will be caught) it's also a revolting, inhuman and barbaric institution and not something the USA should be proud of itself for.Oh, yes, as an afterthought; life imprisonment is cheaper:"Using conservative rough projections, the Commission estimates the annual costs of the present system ($137 million per year), the present system after implementation of the reforms ... ($232.7 million per year) ... and a system which imposes a maximum penalty of lifetime incarceration instead of the death penalty ($11.5 million)."--California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, July 1, 2008Edited by Tangle, : No reason given.

It seems to be something fundamental Christians are often fond of. I've never worked that one out - wwjd? is apparently an invalid question. All very old testament.

I have a grudging respect for those who believe in the death penalty for pure revenge and don't hide behind false arguments of deterrence.But what little respect I have, disappears when they can't properly address the execution of the innocent. You see, if you don't allow for a deterrence effect, you can't even argue that lives will be saved by having the death penalty - even if a few mistakes are made.

Examples of wrongful executions:Wrongful execution - Wikipedia

Sorry, that was a series of red herrings; this discussion is about the abolition of the death penalty - not war and not Bin Laden. I can see why you need to change the subject, but I'm not biting.

That isn't of course the test. The test is to prove GUILT beyond reasonable doubt.However, this is the one that changed the law in the UK (from the wiki which you have read.)Timothy Evans in the United Kingdom, was tried and executed in 1950 for the murder of his baby daughter Geraldine. An official inquiry conducted 16 years later determined that it was Evans's fellow tenant, serial killer John Reginald Halliday Christie, who was responsible for the murder. Christie also admitted to the murder of Evans's wife as well as five other women and his own wife. Christie may have murdered other women, judging by evidence found in his possession at the time of his arrest, but it was never pursued by the police. Evans was pardoned posthumously following this, in 1966. The case prompted the abolition of capital punishment in the UK in 1965.

You've been shown a few cases where a government has admitted that a mistake has been made. There are more where those who have been convicted of what would have been capital crimes before capital punishment was repealed having their convictions quashed after new evidence has been revealed to clear them, or the convictions had been declared unsafe.I don't think that you can realistically argue errors won't be made, so you need to say what you think of those mistakes. Does it affect your opinion that the death penalty is ok?

Fair enough, you want capotal punishment as vengence and you don't care that it will inevitably execute innocent people.That's pretty clear, thanks.

But that IS your opinion is it not? You've made that perfectly clear.Personally, I don't believe it for a minute, you're too intelligent to actually hold it, but that's neither here nor there; I suspect the opinion is widely held.

Sure, that's how we all feel. You'd have to be truly weird for your first thought not to be to want the killers killed - particularly if you were in any way related to those who suffered.But that's why we handed over justice to a third party - the state - so that vengence didn't cloud independent judgement and so that we took time to think and behave rationally.Generally, as society progresses, our baser instincts as represented by our institutions are degraded and we become more civilised, more humane. The USA is still a young nation and it seems to us Eurpeans (not all of course - a suspect a majority here would vote for the death penalty) that you're still a pretty brutalised and brutilising nation.But you are changing.

I'm not sure about most things, but I'm totally sure that the death penalty will never be re-introduced in the UK. People will still want murderes murdered. Nothing will change that. Punishment? Not necessarily. That concept is pretty biblical. Certainly society's offenders have to be dealt with somehow, but how is open to discussion. Wilco, right after you guys stop selling rifles in Walmart next to the corn flakes.

Today's unsafe murder conviction: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-18102336Still, if we'd hanged him, no-one would know that he probably didn't do it, eh?