From www.ratbags.com/rsoles:

"Death penalties have been very much in the news over the last week, with the US having its 1000th judicial killing since the Supreme Court let the executioners out of the dungeons in 1976, and a 25-year-old Australian being hanged in Singapore for carrying drugs. I believe that murderers and rapists should be severely punished and as someone with children and a grandson I have very little sympathy for drug smugglers, but killing the offenders serves no purpose. It deters nobody, causes immeasurable harm to the families of the dead people, and demeans a civilised society. In the case of Van Nyugen in Singapore, the only results were that less than 400 grams of heroin was stopped from getting to Australia, a young man is dead, and his mother has to spend the rest of her life mourning. Her son was greedy, stupid and callously endangered the lives of many people, but if we executed everyone who met those criteria we would need extra executioners to handle the drunken drivers, bosses with unsafe factories, manufacturers of dangerous or faulty goods, and politicians who commit soldiers to foreign wars on false premises based on poor intelligence.

Supporters of the death penalty always like to talk about its deterrent effect, as if anyone ever expects to get caught while committing a crime. It was interesting to see a spokesman for some pro-death lobby group in the US respond when asked whether he was concerned about the thousand executions. He replied that it was a drop in the ocean compared to the 600,000 murders in the USA since 1976, and it was obvious that he couldn't detect the irony in what he was saying. If it is such an effective deterrent, why are there so many murders? In the case of Van Nyugen, any possibility of doing some good by using him as a witness to convict the people who financed him and were going to distribute the heroin in Australia died with him. The next batch of couriers will be told not to fall asleep at Changi airport while waiting to change planes, and nothing will have been achieved in the "war on drugs". There are nine Australians on trial right now in Indonesia facing possible death sentences for carrying heroin, and they went there while the newspapers were full of stories about a highly publicised drug trafficking trial. They were not deterred by the possible penalty, and the fools who will inevitably be chosen to replace them probably won't be deterred either."

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What exactly is the rationale of the death penalty, anyway, and why does America persist with it when so many other civilized nations dispensed with it around the same time it was reinstated there?