Capital punishment does not serve as a deterrent to crime. Normally when people commit crime they are doing so under the assumption they will not get caught and will not get punished at all, or they do the crime with out thinking it through and not thinking of the potential punishment. Then there is the issue of wrongfully accusing and convicting criminals (I think there was a book released recently by the first man exonerated by DNA evidence, after nine years of being on death row). I know there is plenty off cases where there is a vicious attack and a community is outraged and the police make a hasty arrest and will ignore evidence that would suggest that their suspect did not do the crime and prosecute anyway. In these sort of cases an accused person might have their life ruined just by the association with the crime but if they are in fact wrongfully convicted we are taking their most basic right away in error.
Then there is of course the moral issue with this, we live in a civil society that says that killing is wrong, yet we as a society do it to punish. It has always seemed a tad hipocritical to me.
And as Merika posted above it actually costs more money to execute a person than it does to keep them in prison for the rest of their life.
Anyway, I do think that the death penalty is morally repugnant and we are exposing ourselves (as a society) to wrongfully executing people that are not guilty of any crime.
And duke, what you describe sounds strangely medieval.
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