My $0.02 (Cdn funds):

I came to this thread a little late, and much of my thought on the matter has already been expressed. But since everyone seems to be weighing in with their feelings, here goes nothing.

State sanctioned execution violates my very personal feelings about how to treat one another. Those feelings are based largely on "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you", and the early (in life) realization that we so very often misjudge that the risk of being wrong, even within the capital punishment ethic, is so great that innocent lives are lost.

Further, I believe that if serious and radical attempts to train, rehabilitate, reform, educate, cure, council, and incarcerate were undertaken, a greater good would be served by the eventual release of validated and enlightened individuals. Warehousing people in prisons serves no purpose and only embitters the prisoner. However I also believe that "life" should mean the remaining lifetime of the offender assuming an appeal hasn't succeeded, and that most sentances are too short. Incarceration should include, as someone else pointed out, production of essentials and consumables required in prisons, by prisoners, not as slaves but as if they were commune workers.

Expensive? Yes. But since when has it been cheap to buy our way out of our mistakes as a society? My fear is that capital punishment doesn't really make a problem go away, and it reduces its practitioners to killers also, except that they're shielded by the law. (Btw, if it's legal, it doesn't mean it's right or just, but that's another thread.)

Last, I think it's important that the realized causes of crime be addressed by society in the hopes of reducing it. There's our famous gun control threads of course. Grinding poverty, failing education, illicit drugs, greed, moral decay, organized crime, and on and on and on...include the seven deadlies here...Generations will pass before success can be measured, but the quick fix of capital punishment doesn't get us there any sooner.

Peace, Mooh.