Well, all you antis will get your way, and THIS is what it leads to - I've just heard that a 78 year old great grandfather died after being attacked by two drunken yobs when he reprimanded them for urinating on a supermarket wall. They stepped over him to go back into the supermarket to steal more alchohol and stepped over him when they came out.
Only one of them was found guilty and guess what he got ??
TWO F******* YEARS.
That's what lily-livered "justice" and pandering to scum gets you in this country.
I tend to subscribe to most views that are seen as fairly 'left-wing'. But I do agree with Capital Punishment. For me it's a no-brainer - if someone kills a child for their own sexual gratification - they don't deserve to live.
And the argument that the state shouldn't be allowed to take a life - why not? Really - why not?
DarthPhilius. Good point about what if there were lots of witnesses etc, but the problem is you have to have similar sentences for crimes - you can't give one person the death penalty for murder, but give a different convicted murderer life imprisonment.
Sasha - that's why we must have different degrees of murder like they do in the U.S. as there's so obviously a difference between a one-off "crime of passion" and a serial child-killer and they shouldn't get the same punishment.
mariner2 - that's a good point, but again not without it's faults IMO. For example, would racially motivated murder be a higher degree of murder than 'normal' murder? If so, we'd be legislating against what's in people's heads when they commit a crime and I for one think that's a dangerous precedent.
I don't know how they do that in the States, does the prosecution push for "murder one" and the jury decides or what? But surely you can't put someone like Ian Brady alongside a woman that snaps and kills her husband after years of abuse.
It seems, quite incredibly, that the nearest we ever come to even thinking about the death penalty is against the crime of treason as if that is somehow worse than Ian Huntley's crimdes.