I have no problem at all with the guilty being punished, even put to death. But I am still against the death penalty because I have a problem with innocent people dying just so that we can punish the guilty.

It’s like the icecream machine that I don’t have. I would LIKE an icecream machine in my bedroom. But there are good reasons why I can’t have one.

I would like to punish the guilty with death, but this would involve killing innocent people as well. So I can’t have it, because it isn’t worth it to kill innocents just so I can kill the guilty.

It seems from your comments that you also don’t like it when the innocent are harmed, so we have that in common.

But you still haven’t dealt with my objection (which seems common when I have these discussions).

Here it is again: we know, with certainty, that the death penalty kills a small number of innocent people.

So if you support the death penalty then that means you MUST believe that there is a benefit of the death penalty that is MORE IMPORTANT than the life of an innocent person.

Phil seems to believe that being able to punish the guilty is more important than the lives of the innocent people that the death penalty kills.

Jason’s argument is that the joy he will feel in getting revenge on someone who harmed a loved one is more important than the lives of the other innocent people the death penalty will kill.

And neither of those make any sense.

Understand, you can’t have it both ways. If you have the death penalty then innocent people WILL die. This is a historical and statistical fact that no one doubts.

So if you want to support the death penalty you need to provide a motivation that is more important than the life of an innocent person.

And there aren’t any.

And unless you can respond to this post with something that starts with “X is more important than an innocent life” then you really don’t have any (rational) argument left.

The death penalty, when carried out swiftly, is a VERY effective deterrent to crime. When the penalty is delayed by ten or more years, as it often is with our perverse system of endless appeals, THEN it is ineffective. By the time the perpetrator is executed, few people remember his/her name or the crime that he/she committed. As it was in days of old, we should execute convicted criminals in plain sight, and do so within a few weeks, at most, of them being sentenced, especially where the evidence of their crime is plain and unambiguous.

Just be thankful you aren’t living in the UK or Sweden, mush-head.

Moses realized, as did many peoples throughout history, that the only way a society can preserve itself from evil and corrupting behaviors is by eliminating the individuals who promote them, and doing so swiftly, without delay. We may have the death penalty in the United States, but the lack of swift justice, where the convicted may live 10 to 20 years after sentencing, is a perversion of these ancient principles.

There are some criminals for whom the death penalty is too good; we have no punishment harsh enough to fit some crimes. The only fortunate thing in this instance is that the crime was committed in Oklahoma, a state that still enforces the death penalty, not one of those states like California (my state) filled with mush-head liberals, or Colorado and Oregon, overrun with mush-head liberals from places like California and New York.