re: #49 sagehen

My biggest problem with the death penalty is sometimes we get the wrong guy.

Of the four thousand some-odd death penalties handed down since the Supreme Court reinstated it in the 70’s… more than 100 people off death row have been fully exonerated, DNA and all. That’s 2.5%.

There’s undoubtedly more innocents than that still sitting on death row; people whose convictions didn’t rely on biological evidence, or the evidence wasn’t preserved well enough to be still testable. And there’s people who were already executed, or they died of old age, so no one’s even looking at their cases.

The only way to be sure of never executing an innocent… is to never execute anybody.

I agree. I’m simply saying that when people say “I’m generally against the death penalty but in this case……” they are attempting to discharge their rage by killing someone but it doesn’t actually punish the person more than a life sentence. To me, it is like punching a wall to discharge rage. Understandable but ill-advised and pointless.