For ONE minute, I wish all those who support CP would be in that gurney and seeing someone come at them with that needle.  Those f***ers would change their minds in a HEARTBEAT!

The Death Penalty is one of the few issues (gun control being another) is where I venture off the doctrinaire Liberal reservation.  Intellectually, I cannot support it, as it does cost far more to execute someone than it does to imprison them.  Its deterrence value is debatable at best, but I feel it is not the deterrent that its avid supporters claim (Texas being the prime example of vast numbers of executions with little reduction in violent crime.)  It is unfairly and unevenly applied, if you are poor or a minority (and Dog help you if you're both) you are far more likely to be executed than a rich, influential person.  

(My example has always been Gates, not that he would ever do anything like my proposed scenario, but Gates could go on MSNBC and rape, torture and eviscerate a little boy while a Psychiatrist pronounced him mentally stable as he did so and he would never be executed.  That is sadly a fact.  [If it were a little girl, I'm sure that Olbermann and Tweety would offer to help-snark.])

Also, too many innocent people have been "cleared" just hours away from their fate for any reasonable person to be too bloodthirsty about the Death Penalty in general.  There is no adequate recompense after you have already killed an innocent person, a "I'm sorry" and a few million bucks to the family (and they probably won't even get that just doesn't cut it for me.

All that said, my gut/heart tells me there are some people so guilty, so vile and undeserving of the slightest mercy, that I hope that the three-drug cocktail is painful.  I don't feel one whit bad for Ted Bundy as he got his butt fried.  I hope that SOB down in Fla. or wherever it was that buried that 9 year old girl alive suffers like the piece of garbage he is, I'd gladly push the plunger on a reprobate like that.  Maybe that makes me a bloodthirsty buffoon, but I'm comfortable with that.

A perfect case was up here in WA state, a one Mitchell Rupe (I'm guessing on the spelling).  One day in the late 70's or early 80's he robbed a bank in Olympia, WA.  He got his money and the tellers cooperated fully, they followed procedure to a tee, and he left.  For whatever reason, he came back in and shot them execution style when he did not have to, he had gotten away.  He was tried and found guilty, and WA law at the time (and yes, the law was stupid, with some hard-*ss Legislator tried to be overly punitive by not just settling on one mode of execution, but this does not vindicate Rupe in any way) was that the Defendant had an option of choosing electrocution or hanging, and if they refused to choose, they got sentenced to hang.  Rupe refused to choose and got sentenced to hang.  So this rat-b*stard goes to Walla Walla, and ends up getting tremendously fat while eating at the snack center (wrong title, I know, but I don't know what they call it), so fat that his lawyer argued that it would be cruel and unusual punishment to hang him because he had gotten so fat that his poor widdle head might of popped off when they hung him.  (Well, too fricking bad you murdering sadist, maybe you should have thought about that while you were stuffing your face with Ho Hos.)  Of course, the argument worked, so they changed the mode to electrocution, which I think he is still awaiting if he hasn't died of liver failure yet.  Which is another irony of this whole deal, he, a Death Row convict, is on a liver donor list because he poor liver gave out.  The man should have been executed at least 10 years ago but instead is on a freakin' donor list.  Screw that, I wouldn't give that animal an aspirin if he asked, let alone a liver.  If that seems cold, just think that there is some people below him on that list who didn't murder anyone, so they should continue to suffer so this guy is a little more comfortable while he awaits his inevitable (and much deserved) death?  Sorry, that is where my liberalism dies, and I don't feel one bit bad about it at all.

BTW, I'm not debating the law with a bunch of lawyers, because I'll lose very badly.  :)  I grant all of the intellectual arguments are against me, but in the end people are not Vulcans, we have emotions and our emotional needs have to be met.  Let me put it this way, the Duke in '88 won every intellectual argument against Bush in that campaign, and just how did that work out for us?  I'm not saying people should abandon their principles, they absolutely should not, but you can emphasize other principles that sell a little better.  Sorry, I'm going OT now, so I'll stop.

Great subject Jeralyn.

I feel that some people deserve death like Ted Bundy and Timothy McVeigh.  

I realize that's it's not a deterent to crime.  

I wish we could find a way to cut out the cost of giving these people the death penalty.  Perhaps the attorneys could be paid less?  (Ha ha!  I realize this is a "legal eagle" website.)  

But still, I mean, Timothy McVeigh?  What do you suggest?  Life in jail?  Why?  I think there are certain circumstances that make the death penalty perfectly acceptable.