> This is a topic I feel strongly about, so I am actually going to say somnething serious for a change:
>
> I don't believe in the death penalty under any circumstances, for any crime. Some of my reasons are outlined below:
>
> 1) It doesn't undo the crime. It merely means that that individual cannot do anything else, right or wrong.
>
> There is a great assumption in this thread that murderers / rapists / whatever can only be prevented from committing more crimes by killing them. Statistics demonstrate that most serious crimes are one-offs, and unlikely to be repeated.
>
And, if we're going to accept statistics as an argument at all, brutality goes up for a while after an execution, as I posted elsewhere.

> Who here believes that Texas's justice system is 100% reliable?
>
Certainly no one can claim that, of Texas or elsewhere.

> From a trans-Atlantic viewpoint, it seems that
> the US has elected someone who would, under
> other circumstances, be considered a mass
> murderer.
Leave out the other circumstances: he is one, at least indirectly. This discussion is about whether those murders were justified and right or not.

Fuzz"very happy to live in a country whose constitution contains a paragraph that makes the death penalty impossible"pilz