We should keep the death sentence. However, we shoulder cut the "humane" crap. There's nothing humane about being killed by something you're afraid of by the age of 4.
I say again, watch
http://www.ted.com/talks/bryan_stevenson_we_need_to_talk_about_an_injusticeIf you can't spare 20 minutes, just skip ahead to 8:10 and see:
The other way of thinking about [the death penalty] is not "Do people deserve to die for the crimes they commit?" but "Do we deserve to kill?". I mean, it's fascinating, death penalty in America is defined by error. For every nine people who have been executed, we've actually identified one innocent person who's been exonerated and released from death row. A kind of astonishing error rate; one out of nine people, innocent. I mean, it's fascinating... in aviation we would never let people fly on air planes if for every nine air planes that took off, one would crash...
Now, I would still be against the death penalty (or any other form of corporal punishment, for that matter) even if there'd be some magical way to ensure nobody is ever murdered (what else would you call the killing of an innocent person?), but with such ridiculous sloppiness... Hell no, abolish it
today.
According to
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/executions-year there have been 1409 executions (not convictions, actual executions) from 1976 to 2015. So, that would work out to roughly 150
innocent people having been about to be murdered by the US government, saved in the nick of time by lawyers going above and beyond in an attempt to save them. What's worse, realistically speaking,
not all innocents HAVE been saved; there's no way to put a number on it, but there have definitely been people executed for crimes they didn't commit. How can you possibly be in favour of a system like that...!?
