Well I'm another whose against the death penalty & consider it to be murder. Two wrongs can't make it right to take a life. Aside from seeing it as murder I see it as vengence, society's way of relieving it's self of it's duties to try to rehabilate & society's form of pay back with punishment. Some say it saves money, that shouldn't be a factor though, thogh it costs far more & not just in dollars & sense either. Worst than all though is that innocents are murdered. Excution is final, there is no saying "sorry, wrong guy, let revive them". All the others arguements I see as flawed but I can understand one's acceptance of it but not the arguement that an innocent dies as a result of this & usuall it's the poor, a minority, the undereducated or one that's mentally challanged that dies.

Now the system it's self is set up to be cruel in the first place. The same folks mentioned above, when they walk into a court room for justice they don't get the equal treatment that the upper crust get. They get public defender that the court refuses to pay a fair wage to so there starts the road to unequal justice, the under paid & overbooked laywer, whose already feels like he's been handed a bad deal & in turn offers the defendant a worst deal. Plead guilty because I'm not gonna invest any more time than I need to to get rid of you. If you want justice money is the motivator. The defendant has been sitting in the holding tank & will get to sit in the next & bigger joint while waiting to find out about bail & then will really get to sit foralong time when they can't meet that. So by the time the trial should be rolling around the poor bastard takes any deal they can when they're looking at the gamble of do the 5 years with time spent & good behavior & a payroll (pun) you'll be out in 16 months orthers wise the DA's gonna ask for 10 & I'm not fighting for you!

Ok, that's a cruel justice system.
As for the start of this thread, I have to agree. We got some balls cursing other countries about the human rights abuses when we have so many of our own. We do live in a glass house & it's our policy to throw more stones around than just the first ones.   

I'm also of the mind that if we had less abuse of human rights at home we wouldn't have Guantanamos & Abu Ghraibs. We would have had the morals to not allow them to exist. At war, any war we can find that we complain that the enemy we fight, we fight because they mistreat & are cruel when we turn out to be just as cruel & abusive as what we intended to cure.

Then we have the national health, that's all that needs saying.

Yes, we live in a great country but it's great mostly for those that are lucky enough, healthy enough, smart enough or white enough that they can afford to live far above the poverty level.

Barry