Death happens and it’s possible that the condemned won’t even remember he was punished (because he won’t remember anything at all). Why is that a more severe penalty than allowing the murderer to be alone with his thoughts until his body finally shuts down?

The death penalty satisfies us. And it still doesn’t bring our loved ones back.

I didn’t say I endorsed the deterrent argument. I personally don’t believe that a possible killer decides to not kill because the state has the death penalty. But I think that for the most horrible, heinous crimes, we need to have the ultimate penalty on the table.

Im sorry there’s an inherent logic in here? Is it a logic we can apply consistently across all crimes? A rapist should be raped, for instance?

Otherwise, the system is just as broken and undependable as, say, the missile defense shield. We should have ended the death penalty the first time it was proven that an innocent man was put to death. Instead, we just pretended it was an aberration that would never happen again.

Sorry, Oliver, you just argued that deterrence was a perfectly reasonable justification for state-sponsored barbarity. Now it’s idiotic? You can’t have it both ways.

Executing someone for murder or mass killing is perfectly logical. If these people don’t get to live, why should this guy have lived?

The eye-for-an-eye justification is the definition of barbarity. Like it or not, cutting off hands makes about as much sense and is about as logical as state-sponsored execution. The death penalty does, after all, exclude us once again from the ranks of every other civilized country in the world (except Japan, who have only executed 39 prisoners in 14 years), and instead puts us in the company of countries like China, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, and Afghanistan.

If you believe that the state has the right to take a prisoner’s life, then there is no reasonable way to object to torture or any other form of abuse. The moral line you’ve drawn is off the charts.

“It seems unlikely,” Professor Donohue and Professor Wolfers concluded in their Stanford article, “that any study based only on recent U.S. data can find a reliable link between homicide and execution rates.”

The two professors offered one particularly compelling comparison. Canada has executed no one since 1962. Yet the murder rates in the United States and Canada have moved in close parallel since then, including before, during and after the four-year death penalty moratorium in the United States in the 1970s.

The death penalty “is applied so rarely that the number of homicides it can plausibly have caused or deterred cannot reliably be disentangled from the large year-to-year changes in the homicide rate caused by other factors,” John J. Donohue III, a law professor at Yale with a doctorate in economics, and Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in the Stanford Law Review in 2005. “The existing evidence for deterrence,” they concluded, “is surprisingly fragile.”

Gary Becker, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1992 and has followed the debate, said the current empirical evidence was “certainly not decisive” because “we just don’t get enough variation to be confident we have isolated a deterrent effect.”

But, Mr. Becker added, “the evidence of a variety of types — not simply the quantitative evidence — has been enough to convince me that capital punishment does deter and is worth using for the worst sorts of offenses.”

It doesn’t sound to me like there is any reason to assume that these studies definitively prove anything.