Want the criminal to feel real pain? Lock him up and never let him or her go outside for the rest of there life. Longer they are in prison the better in my opinion. Death Penalty is just a cop out, quick fix.[/DIV]
You don't get the Death Penalty for minor crimes, or even for most types of murder. You get it for brutal and premeditated murder. The type where you fantasize about your crime, plan for it, hunt your victims. Spending the rest of your life in a place where you're warm and fed, where you can read, watch television, exercise, socialize, whack off while you relive the delicious memory of a woman begging for her life while you stab her to death... Oh, but it's "real pain" just because you can't walk out the door and leave when you want?
I'm not saying that means it's a clever idea to torture murderers to death, or that I trust the government with killing people. I am a liberal, a pacifist, and an agnostic. I have never been in a fight or spanked my kids. I don't enjoy the pain of others, not even in "harmless" ways like laughing at home videos with people falling on their butts or smushing wedding cake on each others' faces. I am a wuss. But the Death Penalty is not actually meant to be a deterrant or a lesson. It's a consequence. Of bad actions and bad choices. Administered to bad people. You don't get to that point by making a mistake. And the whole argument about how it's actually more expensive to execute people than to incarcerate them for their natural life is not accurate. It's trying to PREVENT their being executed that surpasses the cost of incarceration. The legal stuff. The execution itself is cheap. And every time a murderer is executed, while it's not PC to show it on the outside in the circles in which I move... my recycling, non-car-owning, volunteer-work-doing, Democrat-voting, cruelty-free-hemp-lotion-moisturized hands secretly clap together in approval. I am glad somone is willing to pull the switch, even knowing that it won't bring anyone's murdered loved-one back. And I don't stand by comfortably intellectualizing or philosophizing about the fine ethical points of how the grieving family or our entire culture chooses to deal with a pain and rage I am lucky enough not to understand first hand.
