If you're still for the Death Penalty after reading Bob Herbert's piece----

[trumad]

then in MHO you're morally fucked up.

<snip>
The egregious problems identified by Justice Stevens (and other prominent Americans who have changed their minds in recent years about capital punishment) have always been the case. The awful evidence has always been right there for all to see, but mostly it has been ignored. The death penalty in the United States has never been anything but an abomination — a grotesque, uncivilized, overwhelmingly racist affront to the very idea of justice.

Police and prosecutorial misconduct have been rampant, with evidence of innocence deliberately withheld from defendants being prominent among the abuses. Juries have systematically been shaped — rigged — to heighten the chances of conviction, and thus imposition of the ultimate punishment.

Prosecutors and judges in death penalty cases have been overwhelmingly white and male and their behavior has often — not always, but shockingly often — been unfair, bigoted and cruel. The Death Penalty Information Center has reams of meticulously documented horror stories.

Innocents have undoubtedly been executed. Executions have been upheld in cases in which defense lawyers slept through crucial proceedings. Alcoholic, drug-addicted and incompetent lawyers — as well as lawyers who had been suspended or otherwise disciplined for misconduct — have been assigned to indigent defendants. And it has always been the case that the death penalty machinery is fired up far more often when the victims are white.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/30/opinion/30herbert.html?_r=1&hp

[LWolf]

1. I've never been for the death penalty. nt

[angstlessk]

2. WOW, every reply is against the death penalty..thought I would get a few

who favored it...even one who had lost a loved one to a serial killer was against the death penalty...

I believe we DO kill innocent people, but then those in favor say...well, if they are in jail they must have done SOMETHING? Ignorance knows no bounds!

[Blue_Tires]

3. he's right -- there has always been a racial slant to it...

[Incitatus]

4. Unfortunately, the only thing that would change some the minds of some people

is if a loved one they know is innocent is sentenced to death. Innocent people have been sentenced, that is a fact. Some death penalty supporters just don't seem to care.