A cause for celebration.

[kandrathe]

Well, you've picked the most emotionally charged of crimes to try to have a civil discussion around.

There have been some cases where due to fear and coaching by over zealous investigators, some day care providers have been wrongly accused. In these cases it would be hard to undo the death penalty.

Contrary to your blanket statement of people who commit certain crimes of being unredeemable, some sex offenders and even child molesters are rehabilitated. It is hard to know which are and which are not. Most of them were abused themselves. Certainly killing them all stops the cycle of abuse, which is cruel but effective.

Finally there is the heinous nature of the offense. Sweetly and humanely plugging your wife in the head while she sleeps, or tossing your children out of the window, or driving them into the lake can hardly compare to a prolonged torture, and rape in a home fashioned dungeon. I think it would be very hard to try to be an objective judge in deciding fair punishments when comparing the worst of crimes.

Also understand that we only tend to hear about the worst or the worst, so fashioning punishments or laws based on extreme anecdotes seems also frivolous. In the US of about 300 million people, there are about 42,000 (0.014%) people killed in car accidents, 20,000 (0.0066%) killed by the common flu, and about 15,000 (0.005%) murders. Most (99%) of those murders are the boring so-and-so was killed by rival gang members over drug turf, or so-and-so got wasted and shot/beat/stabbed his ____ to death, or so-and-so got drunk and drove his car into ____ type of murders.

The bottom line is that you get all worked up about the 150 to 300 really heinous crimes that get alot of news coverage each year, and you let that .00005% of human garbage taint your view of all humanity. I'd say you should get a new hobby, and learn to love the 99.99995% of humanity that is not human garbage, or at least is more redeemable.