The death penalty is no good. Not a moral issue to me, but a broken system issue., and as an alleged deterrent,no study says having a death penalty reduces murder rates, therefor it doesn't deter anything. Honestly, I would feel much better about the death penalty if there were massive reforms on prosecutor accountability when it comes to with holding exculpatory evidence from the defense, as well as video taping all confessions. Prosecutors are rarely penalized when caught with holding, even when the guy who they knew was innocent, railroad him just to keep their stats up and can be considered tough on crime.
Also, there was a scumbag forensic expert witness named Fred Zain who testified in hundreds if not thousands of cases, many of them Capitol murder, and would always have the goods for the prosecution, until Barry Scheck and his cohorts checked him out and realized he didn't even have the equipment to run the tests he claimed to be doing! With people like this I'm not sure I trust the system... With what we have now it is far to easy to convict the innocent.
[link to en.wikipedia.org]
Support the Innocence project and help these poor guys out, and surely good karma will come your way.
[link to www.innocenceproject.org]