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COMMENTS:
Voted : No
Ghandhi said it best, 'those cultures who practice an eye for an eye become a nation of blind people'
Voted : Yes
When a serial killer is caught red-handed as he's about to brutally murder his 20th victim (the other 19 are buried under his basesment), I'm pretty sure there's no chance of human error.
So legalised murder is fine then?
"Only for people like McVeigh" falls squarely in the "yes' category.
If you can get over the moral issues of lawfully killing someone you still have the facts that the death-sentence is more expensive than a life-sentence and has nerver been shown to be a deterent.
http://www.uvm.edu/~vlrs/doc/deathpenalty.htm
No, Steel. There's a difference between murder and killing. When you kill in self defence, it's not murder. And when society kills sub-human garbage like serial killers or sadists who torture old ladies or children before they kill them, society is defending itself.
The death penalty also sends out a message that we, as a society, think so little of these bruts, that we don't even want to waste our time or resources taking care of them in prison.
Voted : No
In Florida, at John Ballard's trial, 9 of the 12 jurors recommended a death sentence. The judge decided to sentence Ballard to death, commenting: "You have not only forfeited your right to live among us, but under the laws of the state of Florida, you have forfeited your right to live at all.
Fortunately before it was too late: The Florida Supreme Court unanimously overturned the conviction of death row inmate John Robert Ballard and ordered his acquittal in the 1999 murders of two of his acquaintances.
From the Chicago Tribune
CORSICANA, Texas -- Strapped to a gurney in Texas' death chamber earlier this year, just moments from his execution for setting a fire that killed his three daughters, Cameron Todd Willingham declared his innocence one last time.
"I am an innocent man, convicted of a crime I did not commit," Willingham said angrily. "I have been persecuted for 12 years for something I did not do."
While Texas authorities dismissed his protests, a Tribune investigation of his case shows that Willingham was prosecuted and convicted based primarily on arson theories that have since been repudiated by scientific advances. According to four fire experts consulted by the Tribune, the original investigation was flawed and it is even possible the fire was accidental.
oops
Issue 10 of Justice Denied examined Odell Barnes, Freddie Lee Wright and Philip Workman, who are all probable victims of manufactured evidence and corrupt proceedings. Barnes was executed on March 1st in Texas, and Wright's execution was on March 3rd in Alabama. Workman is scheduled to be killed April 6 in Tennessee.
Among cases mentioned in previous issues of Justice Denied is David Wayne Spence, executed by the state of Texas on April 3, 1997 despite the conclusion of the police lieutenant who supervised the case that "I do not think David Spence committed this crime." The homicide detective on the case added, "My opinion is that David Spence was innocent. Nothing from the investigation ever led us to any evidence that he was involved." One of the inmates who testified in Spence's trial, Robert Snelson, said, "We all fabricated our accounts of Spence confessing in order to try to get a break from the state on our cases."
From a Stanford Law Review Article: In Bedau and Radelet's view, since 1987 the executed prisoner most likely to have been innocent was Jesse Tafero who, along with Pedro Medina (described later in this article), also has the distinction of having been set on fire by Florida's now-abandoned electric chair "Old Sparky." Bedau and Radelet write in the preface to the 1994 edition of In Spite Of Innocence:
In Florida, Sonia Jacobs and Jesse Tafero were convicted of murdering a state trooper and his companion in 1976 and were sentenced to death. The chief evidence against them was supplied by the third person at the scene of the crime, an ex-convict named Walter Rhodes. In exchange for his testimony, Rhodes pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and received a life sentence.
In 1981 Jacobs' death sentence was reduced to life imprisonment. But in 1990 Tafero -- despite his protestations of innocence -- was executed. Micki Dickoff, a childhood friend of Jacobs', read about Tafero's execution and reestablished contact with Jacobs. Thanks to Dickoff's unflagging efforts, federal courts threw out Jacobs' conviction; in 1992 she was released when the state admitted not having the evidence to retry her. It now appears Jacobs was completely innocent.
Warren McCleskey, denying that he killed a policeman during a robbery that McCleskey admitted participating in, was executed by Georgia in September, 1991, after losing two important Supreme Court cases in four years. His case was marked by brazen government misconduct. The only solid evidence that McCleskey was the triggerman was a fellow inmate's claim that McCleskey had confessed; through tortuous legal work years after the trial, it was discovered that this inmate was a planted informant promised leniency in return for his cooperation. The state deliberately concealed this evidence and continually lied about the concealment for years. The US Supreme Court ruled that despite the state's successful cover-up, defense attorneys should have known they were being lied to and couldn't later raise the issue.
Shortly before Coleman Gray's execution in Virginia on February 26, 1997, several witnesses admitted falsely testifying that Gray told them he killed store manager Richard McClelland.
oops
I've got more...
Seems like there might be a problem with the death penalty.
Sooo... lets see someone defend the executions of these innocent people.
Murder, Bostonian is a pre meditated taking of a life, what is state sanctioned execution if it isn't premeditated?
Killing in self defence or by accidental means is manslaughter at best and is not pre meditated.
Therein lies the difference, as to your presumption that the death penalty sends out a message, the evidence shows no drop in the murder rate and it has been proven to actually increase it.
If you are going to die for one murder, whats to stop you doing 10 others?
Life imprisonment seems to me to be the harshest punishment as the murderer will have 50 plus years to reconcile his act.
I would go on to say it is better to let 9 guilty men go free than to allow one innocent man to die.
We are not barbarians and we should be able to punish our miscreant citizens that doesnt make us look like we still live in the dark ages.
Sounds like things are worse than I thought.
Voted : Yes
Yes, when the case is clear cut and there can be no doubt.
I'll point out to herzog and the other yes voters that many of those later exonerated were thought to be "clear cut cases" as are some of those who were innocent and then executed.
Voted : No
No. They can NEVER be 100% certain, and being found innocent after you're dead isnt much help.
Of course there can be a 100 percent certain. When your caught on video or if other people see you. It is clear cut. Bostonian has it right.
^The video could be faked, the man might just look like you, what you are doing might be taken out of context, someone could have framed you, etc etc etc
There are an infinite amount of possibilities and coincidences that could conspire to make an innocent man look guilty, you can NEVER be 100% certain. The death penalty on the other hand is 100% FINAL.
Voted : No
Better to "fail to punish" 100 murderers than wrongly execute one innocent man.
Former Texas Governor, George Herzog McChimpy, has claimed that Texas never makes an error when carrying out the death penalty in Texas.
Of course, now that he's president, he also claims infallibility in everything and we can see how that's gone down. 
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