Here's something about the psychology of capital punishment. It's from Dostoevsky's the Idiot. Dostoevsky had been taken out to be shot by firing squad and reprieved just before the order was given:

'To kill for murder is a punishment incomparably worse than the crime itself. Murder by legal sentence is immeasurably more terrible than murder by brigands. Anyone murdered by brigands, whose throat is cut at night in a wood, or something of that sort, must surely hope to escape till the very last minute. There have been instances when a man has still hoped for escape, running or begging for mercy after his throat was cut. But in the other case all that last hope, which makes dying ten times as easy, is taken away for certain. There is the sentence, and the whole awful torture lies in the fact that there is certainly no escape, and there is no torture in the world more terrible.

I used to be pro-death penalty, then I started to observe government incompetence first hand, and realized you can't trust them to execute the right people.

I don't at all think the death penalty should be taken lightly -- even one unjust death is a serious problem. That said, is the death penalty really more barbaric than forcing someone to live in a ten foot cell for the remainder of their life? I'd argue in cases where a person is not just guilty, but also actively dangerous to society, it might be less barbaric (and probably less expensive) to end their life somewhat humanely.

This isn't to say that I'm pro-capital-punishment. But I think the discussion around how we treat convictions needs to be more nuanced than the one we usually have today. Life in prison is a worse penalty than death, by most measures.

Unfortunately, we still require some mechanism in society for dealing with the extreme cases. While we shouldn't be resorting to it as often as we do, still, it seems death and life in prison exhaust the available options for a serial murderer or the like.

While I agree that some murderers deserve to be hung, in the UK Hindley, Shipman, West to name but three, I do not believe that death is appropriate. Remove them from society for the rest of their natural lives by all means but even though the obvious killers would remain alive, and don't necessarily deserve to, you have to allow for an imperfect system where the innocent would be, and have been, sentenced to death.

I think the death penalty is barbaric and antiquated. The US is the only country in the Americas to cary out the death penalty. According to Amnesty International, only 53 countries have the death penalty vs. 142 that do not. The US carried out 5 executions in 2017.

I have been against the death penalty for 30+ years.

There are good arguments on both sides and I remain undecided. IMO it’s not a moral issue, even if an occasional innocent person is executed. What about all the innocent people killed in wars? I can only conclude that an individual human body has little value. The right policy is the one that gives the best outcome for society.

The way we execute people in the US though seems pretty irrational. Keeping a person on death row for ten or twenty years for endless rounds of legal proceedings is ridiculous. What I think is that Americans no longer have the stomach to do the job properly. This is born out also by the ruse that there are no suitable drugs available when any veterinarian could do the job handily at any time.

If the public is all that squeamish we should just stop the killing. One pertinent question is whether or not you yourself would be willing to personally be the executioner. For me the answer is no.

Maybe I’m decided after all.

I believe no country can call itself civilised if it executes it’s own citizens. The risk of a miscarriage of justice is real and if even one innocent person is executed it is reason enough to abolish it.

I sometimes wonder what the problem is getting certain drugs together to kill a guy. I hear just a speck of Fentanil will kill ten guys. So what's up with that?

Hanging might be effective and put it on live TV so everyone could see how many times the body would jump. Then teens and other loonies would want to do a crime deserving of the death penalty because they are going to prove their bodies could jump the most. A Death Cult would be born. Records would be kept.