I believe the death penality is appropriate for serious crime. Not for women who kill their abusive husband (justifiable homicide) type of murder but for murder in general. Physical strength to defend oneself becomes an issue where bullies are concerned, such as rapists. Rat poison in the vegimite can be an option!

The killing of children, police and others "doing their job" is murder, and in so doing I believe all rights are forfieted, by their killer. So many killers cry when it is their turn to die, but what of their victims rights?

In Australia, I believe the death penality is appropriate for drug importers and dealers of hard drugs. The living death that addiction causes is worse than any legally administered instantaneous injection.

We kill innocents in war without regrets, yet cry "foul" when murderers would die! We need to get our priorities right!

Choice

While the death penalty may indeed be appropriate for those convicted of the most heinous crimes, my biggest problem with it is the impossibility of guaranteeing that those who are convicted of these crimes are always those that committed them.

Dudley claims that the US figures for those being erroneously convicted of capital crimes are inflated - but he doesn't provide the 'true' figure. How many people being wrongly convicted of a capital crime is acceptable? Scary stuff indeed.

Given the appalling revelations of wrongful convictions within our own jurisdictions recently, I would have very little confidence in the infallibility of Australian courts in their determinations of even minor crimes - let alone capital offences if we had a death penalty.

The Death Penalty: Protecting the Innocent

"To be sure, 30 or 40 categorically innocent people have been released from death row . . . ". ' (1)

This when death penalty opponents are claiming the release of 119 "innocents" from death row. The deceptions of those opponents were not broadly exposed, earlier, because most in the media had forgotten to fact check . Death penalty opponents never required actual innocence in order for cases to be added to their "exonerated" or "innocents" list.

One would have a hard time finding 20-25 "categorically innocent" people released from death row, who were prosecuted during the modern US death penalty, after 1972, post Furman v Georgia.
 
During that same, post Furman period, about 7500 have been sentenced to death. We now know of a 0.3% error rate (0.4%, using Liptak's lower number) for sentencing actually innocent people to death.
 
None were executed -- meaning both trial and appeals have seen a 100% record in executing the guilty and sparing the innocent.
 
Could anyone have predicted a system that was 99.6-99.7% accurate in finding actual guilt and raising that number to 100%,  on appeal, by sparing actual innocents the carrying out of that sentence?
 
Based upon the accuracy of the actually guilty convicted and the appellate record of identifying actual innocents, is there a more accurate criminal justice practice in the world than the US death penalty? Maybe not.
 
There is no proof of an innocent executed in the US, at least since 1900.
 
Is execution an enhanced incapacitator?
 
Living murderers are infinitely more likely to harm and murder, again, than are executed murderers.  Who would have known?
 
Full report -  All Innocence Issues: The Death Penalty, upon request.
 
(1) "The Death of Innocents': A Reasonable Doubt",
New York Times Book Review, p 29, 1/23/05, Adam Liptak,
national legal correspondent for The NY Times

Choice – I agree with your sentiment entirely.

A murder based on an “emotional response” be it a battered wife or hen-pecked husband may well be
1 "Reactive" to the moment – and if accompanied by contrition, potentially forgivable.
2 It is an offence which is unlikely to be repeated.

The opposite is true of drug dealers.

1 The act is a “money” motivated, cold and calculating offence, without the mitigation of emotional influence.
2 The dealing in drugs is a progression in depravity and exploitation of people the dealer may not even know and recidivism rates would suggest all and every drug dealer is likely to re-offend.

Drug dealers, regardless of their own possible dependency, have displayed a complete indifference to their victims and offend and when caught express no expression of contrition or remorse (except for their own pathetic plight) and thus – represent an ongoing danger to the public and should be exterminated painlessly and expeditiously

Three years hard labour for graffiti? Yeah people are going to be opposed to that, I wonder why.

I have no doubt that the death penalty has a deterrent effect for some people. But I think that most of the criminals A) don't think they will be caught, B) don't care if they are caught or C) aren't really considering the consequences. Moreover, capital punishment is a legal and social endorsement of violence; executions can fuel bloodlust and promote vengeance. Hence, it encourages violent crime which counters the deterrent effect.

Concern for the innocently condemned is reasonable, but that wouldn't prevent some executions. I can't imagine any need for the death penalty within our society, prisons can be made secure and life imprisonment is a far greater punishment.

The brutalization effect finds that murders will increase because potential murderers will murder because of the example of state executions.

Although deterrence is much more than a simple look at only execution rates and murder rates, we do find that as executions have risen dramatically, the murder rate has plunged.

From 1966-1980, a period which included our last national moratorium on executions (June 1967- January 1976), murders in the United States more than doubled from 11,040 to 23,040. The murder rate also nearly doubled, from 5.6 to 10.2/100,000.  During that 1966-1980 period, the US averaged 1 execution every 3 years, with a maximum of two executions per year.  From 1995-2000 executions averaged 71 per year, a 21,000% increase over the 1966-1980 period.  The US murder rate dropped from a high of 10.2/100,000 in 1980 to 5.5/100,000 in 2000 -- a 46% reduction. The US murder rate is now at its lowest level since 1966 (17).

The Texas example -- The murder rate in Harris County (Houston), Texas has fallen 73% since executions resumed in 1982, through 2000, from 31/100,000 to 8.5/100,000 (18).  Harris County is, by far, the most active death penalty sentencing and execution jurisdiction in the US.  The Harris County murder rate dropped nearly 70% more than did the national murder rate, during similar periods. Texas' murder rate dropped 62% during that same period, or 41% more than the national average.

Potential murderers may have been affected by the example of the state of Texas but, likely, not in a manner consistent with brutalization. 

And "(t)he biggest decline in murder rates has occurred in states that aggressively use capital punishment." (19)

After a thorough review of deterrence studies, Professor Samuel Cameron observed, "The brutalization idea is not one the economists have given any credence." "We must conclude that the deterrence effect dominates the opposing brutalization effect." (20)