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its simple they kill people who kill othere people so they wount do it agine. And to show othere people if you kill someone you will also be killed.

Personally I think that if you kill some one or multiple people, it would be more torture to rot in jail. Thinking about what you did, day after day until you do die. Alot of people who support the death penalty I've noticed just don't want to pay to allow people to stay in jail. Yes I know it's a big deal because of the money, but if I had to pay alittle extra in taxes every year to do so I would. Because I'd know that another life hasn't been destroyed and that this person is going to be reminded daily of what he/she has done.

But I can honestly say if someone killed some one I love...they wouldn't be going to jail. I would probably be put in jail for killing the SOB..
^ Sorry, just being myself. ninja

The most logical explanation is probably only that it's human nature to punish those who commit wrongs. Thousands of years ago, the "eye for an eye" policy was started by Hammurabi (though a valid argument could be made that this code was not truly an "eye for an eye" because of the discrepancies in punishment that it established based on social status of the victim and the criminal), and today, the same sort of idea continues to exist as rationale for the death penalty. It has to have something to do with human nature.

The reason can't be an attemt to remove all of the 'bad' people from society so that the 'good' can exist in peace. For one thing, the idea sounds like a philosophical equivalent of ethnic cleansing, one that could easily turn into the removal of political opponents and such, and as the system is now, it doesn't seem like that could happen as easily as it would if that were the justification for it. But, the bigger reason why the penalty cannot be part of a larger attempt to get rid of 'bad' people for the benefit of 'good' people is the total ambiguity of those moral classifications. Think of the Stanford Prison Experiment, in which students took on roles as prisoners or as guards, and after three days, a third of the 'guards' became genuinely sadistic towards the prisoners. The experiment was supposed to last a week, but had to be ended early because the conditions had become dangerous due to the actions of the participants- and according to the Wikipedia article on the experiment, most of the guards were upset by that decision. Think of just about any violent revolution, especially the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror. The point is, anybody can become evil. Except for eliminating all people in general, there is no way to eliminate all evil people. And that's just using the idea that an action is evil, bad, or otherwise unethical when it harms people other than oneself- and not everyone can even agree on that, based on what I've been reading. When you take into account ideas such as objectivism, which holds that an action is ethical if it is in one's rational self interest; that the definition of morality is the pursuit of individual happiness. And that brings up issues of the definition of self-interest and happiness, and questions of whether and how one can know what will result in their greatest happiness. But, I'm digressing.

I'm not sure whether the rationale for the death penalty could be cost. I don't really have a way to know exactly how the cost of that penalty would compare with the cost of lifetime imprisonment- but I have heard accounts that imprisonment would cost less. It makes sense- a New York Times article a while ago states that there is a significant shortage of doctors willing to perform the procedure, so the law of supply and demand would drive up the cost, and that's excluding the cost of all of the chemicals and such.

The question of what would be a greater punishment is an important one. A lot of it would have to do with individual philosophy- how one believes life should be spent, and what one believes comes after death. The death penalty is not the same thing if you believe that the criminal will have an unending afterlife of physical torture as it is if you believe that death is a permanent end to consiousness, after which there can be nothing. With the amount of disagreement that is bound to exist, it wouldn't be rational to support the penalty because it might be worse. Then, that begs the question- for whom should the punishment be worse? Should the family of the victims feel that the defendant is getting the worst possible punishment? Or should the criminal feel that his punishment is the worst that is possible? Ideally, it would be both, but what if there is a discrepancy?

One last point- and one that I'm quite surprised has not been brought up- is the finality of the death penalty as compared to imprisonment. The judicial system is not perfect, even DNA testing has it's errors. Samples can be contaminated or inadverently switched through simple human error. Juries can easily be biased, either in the defendant's advantage or disadvantage. In the 1920's, there was the Sacco and Vanzetti case, in which two Italian immigrants, and members of the socialist party, were sentenced to death for murder during a robbery- a crime for which there was minimal, if any evidence against them. That's just one example. In a case like that, the death penalty is irreversible- if the ruling is later overturned, nothing can be done, whereas a person can always be released from a prison. Granted, it isn't a situation that comes up on a daily basis, but if there is a possibility of killing a person unjustly, it must be taken into consideration.

People figure that someone has to pay. It's an eye for an eye. Human logic is rather faulty when it comes to things that affect the heart. I guarantee you if someone was killed that nobody cared about, they'd be more lenient on the murderer.

Revenge IS punishment by definition as I posted earlier. And how about justice? Making the conscious decision to stab somebody who has not shown themselves to be a real physical threat to you first does not make you deserving of "help." (Somewhere around here I know I've written several posts on both the nature of justice and the death penalty in relation to it...I just wish I could remember where...) Many people will not wish to be "helped" if you were even to try to, they will not get "better" for being unwilling. Also, if you offer assistance to criminals, doesn't that give incentive to people who can not get it otherwise, or at least don't think they can, to commit crimes?

I think it says something for how bad a thing a person must do to have rendered themselves so insignificant and their life and concerns so inconsequential that their very lives hang on whether it is more practical for those they are being made to make right again with to keep them alive or kill them off.