Of course there may be innocent people on death row from time to time. If we could magically know for certain that everyone on death row was guilty of a capital offense and that there were no mitigating circumstances that would make the death penalty unjust, we could clear out death row in a matter of weeks (assuming the drugs/bullets/nitrogen gas/whatever was available).

The key to getting the death penalty "right" (setting aside arguments that it is inherently unjust) is to make sure that only people who deserve to die are actually executed and to make the execution process itself as quick, painless, and clean as possible.

By the way, there are people in prison for non-death-penalty crimes who are innocent, and there are people who have been released or who never went to jail who have criminal records they didn't earn. Our justice system is far from perfect and I doubt it will ever be perfect. I'm willing to live with the small chance that I will be falsely arrested and locked up for life in exchange for having a functioning justice system, but I'm not willing to be arrested, tried, condemned, and executed for a crime I never committed. If this means throwing out the death penalty for even the most heinous of criminals in favor of life-without-parole, I can live with that.

When I said "[Your previous comment "that some people have truly lost the right to be considered human any more"] may be true under the legal codes of some countries" I was conceding to you that I do not know the laws of every country and it is conceivable that at least one country's laws may say that people are no longer people in the eyes of the law if they commit certain criminal acts. Or maybe no country does. I simply do not know.

I don't see how admitting my ignorance of foreign law makes me a monster.

I also don't see how the fact that, for now at least (until/unless the Supreme Court says otherwise), Treason is a death-penalty offense in America is related to any of the comments I made in this post.

Odd, I thought they put a bullet through your brain stem. Did they change it recently or was the bullet thing just for drug dealers?

You really should read the Bible. In many places in the Old Testament where God himself tells the Israelites (and their predecessors) to kill people who are guilty of certain crimes, including but not limited to murder, rape, and certain idolatry-related practices.

Also, you should read your New Testament. According to the Bible, whether we go to hell or not is a function of God's grace, not our actions or inactions other than the action of accepting or rejecting that grace.

The high cost of the death penalty in the United States is largely due the high cost of making sure we don't execute an innocent person. Assuming that the cost of executing an innocent person is "infinite" then even spending $1M in legal cost prosecuting (and defending - the state typically pays for expensive defense lawyers at trial and appeal) death penalty cases and keeping the condemned person locked up for the typically 5-15 years (sometimes more, sometimes less) in a maximum-or-supermax-level prison during that time is the expensive part.

If prosecutors choose to go for "life without parole" the trial is cheaper, the appeal is not necessarily automatic (it might be in some states), and the state may not be on the hook for the appellate defense lawyer. After the condemned prisoner spends a few years in a maximum-security prison he will likely "mellow out"/"become institutionalized" and he can be moved to a cheaper lower-security facility.

If you want to execute people on the cheap, remove some of the due process and accept that you will occasionally condemn and execute an innocent man.

$100,000???? Where do you get that number from?

The average cost of incarcerating an inmate in America is on the order of $30-$40K/year, not $100K/year. Those who need to be in SuperMax or equivalent (including "death row" inmates in most states) and those who are medically fragile cost more. I would expect most "lifers" would require Maximum- or higher-level security during the first few years and during those years the cost could be $100K or more, but I would also expect that your average "lifer" who has adjusted to prison life and given up on trying to maintain contact with the outside would have an average- or below-average incarceration cost until he got old and his medical condition deteriorated. In other words, your 20-year-old murderer would be relatively expensive during the first and last 5 years of his incarceration and relatively cheap for the middle decades.

This may be true under the legal codes of some countries and it may be true under your moral code and perhaps even the moral code of a majority of Americans, but it is not true under the United States Constitution. All human beings who could ever be convicted of a crime are considered "persons" under the law, and being convicted and condemned does not and, barring a constitutional amendment, cannot change that status.

Furthermore, it's almost impossible for a person who is born a US citizen to involuntarily lose their citizenship under the US Constitution, particularly if they never leave the country, never indicate any allegiance to any foreign power, and never act on behalf of another country against the interest of the United States (and even then, it is probably impossible). For naturalized citizens whose naturalization did not involve any fraud and who never do any of the other things listed above, it's also almost impossible to strip them of their citizenship.

I assume you would give them the same access to lawyers and religious counselors that condemned prisoners routinely have today (at least in some countries).

Do you mean "re-legalized"? Leaving deformed infants or just-plain-unwanted-children in the wilderness "for the Gods to take care of" or something similar has been legally acceptable at times during human history.

I can think of several alternatives, the most obvious one being to incarcerate them (with special administrative segregation so they can't order hits from behind bars and special in-prison segregation so they can't kill guards or fellow inmates) until such time as their risk of killing others is zero. This may mean keeping them locked up this way until they die of natural causes.

Oh, if you are referring to the innocent person they killed that earned them the death penalty in the first place, even being executed won't be able to bring that person back, and the deterrent effect of the death penalty vs. life-in-prison-without-parole isn't strong enough in the US at least to justify the death penalty all by itself.

This isn't entirely correct.

1) Hangings and firing squads aren't error-proof and that bothers some who favor the death penalty.

2) There is something to be said for sanitary: The condemned prisoner's family didn't do anything wrong. Denying them a decent-looking body to bury is something that the state should avoid if possible. However, if the only legal (as determined by the SCOTUS) methods of execution result in a body that needs a lot of cleanup by the undertaker, that's tough cookies for the family.

Having said all of this, I'm generally against the death penalty as it is applied in the United States:

* Too many US states allow people to be condemned under the "law of parties," "murder during the commission of another felony," and for murders by people with no previous convictions for crimes that could have gotten them long prison terms. In almost all if not all of these cases, life-without-parole is a much more civilized punishment than death.

* Too many US states also don't disallow the death penalty if there were mitigating circumstances like an IQ only slightly higher than that of a mentally retarded person, a person who is young or immature but legally an adult, a person who is under the undue influence of someone else, mild- to-moderate mental impairments that would clearly benefit from the help of a mental health professional but which do not rise to the level of legal insanity, and the like.

When a jury condemns someone to die, they are basically saying "we give up on you as a human being." I'm almost never willing to do this. In the few cases where I am, it says that I am less civilized than I would like to be.

Assuming the guilty person has no extenuating circumstances, I am willing to recognize my lack of civility and recommend a death sentence for the principal actors (i.e. ringleader, top-lieutenants, and if they were truly free agents, the trigger-men) for things like large-scale "crimes against humanity" (dare I invoke Godwin's Law?) and for premeditated murder for the purpose of corrupting justice, such as to kill or intimidate a witness in a criminal case or intimidate other police (the ones who weren't killed) into resigning or looking the other way. I can also see it for people who commit (or arrange for) a murder while serving a life-without-parole sentence or while "on the run" after escaping prison while they are serving a life-without-parole sentence, on the grounds that without the threat of the death penalty they would be "free" to murder under the theory that "if you are willing to do the time, you are free to do the crime."

The 1970s called, they want their common sense back.

Unless this was a stripped-hown, hardened version with nothing but a custom kernel and custom-everything else with all unnecessary bits stripped out and hardening put on top of it, I wouln't trust it unless it had a voter-verified, human-manually-coutable paper ballot as part of the voting process for every vote.

Wait, what am I saying? Even if it was stripped and hardened, I wouldn't trust any voting system that didn't have a way to print a ballot that the voter actually saw which could be examined in a manual recount.

It's a bright shade of very pale peach/yellow. If I were any more pale, I would be almost like an albino but without the pink eyes.

Except when I get out in the sun, then it's a bright shade of red, almost like an albino with sunburn.

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For the sarcasm impaired: We all have colored skin.

... as long as you need it to minus one second.