You're right, it is a very tough question... I think I would have a very hard time if I had to sit on a jury and decide whether another person lived or died. It would have to be an incredibly heinous crime with a lot of solid evidence for me to concider the death penalty. That's the kind of decision that could haunt a person for the rest of their life.

I don't support it at all for a lot of reasons.

Lifelong imprisonment with nothing to play except for Superman64. Oh the humanity!

In germany that case is called 'Notwehr' (acting in self-defence). It means, if you kill someone in a situation to stop him from doing harm to others and theres no other way, then it's no crime. So to avoid that your sister gets raped, you can kill the rapists without having to fear consequences. But this case does not apply to capital punishment. The criminal is already imprisoned. He is not longer a threat to anyone. Death penalty is not a act of self-defence. The real question is: What are the advantages and the misadvantages of death penalty. As I can see, there are no advantages, countries executing death penalty usually have higher rates of capital crimes, than countries without death penalty. Vengeance is to less of a reason, to kill a human. And can a murder be a useful member of the society later? Yes. Many murderers that served a sentence and showed remorse, were able to integrate later in the society. Want we cut away this chance by killing the criminal?

As Albert Pierrepoint said: "Capital Punishisment is just another word for revenge".

And that's coming from Englands most prolific and famous hangman

The death penalty is just wrong because we should have no right to choose when a human should die or not no matter what they did. Some kind of extreme solitary confinement is a much "better"/acceptable punishment for such extreme crimes. But the death penalty seems quite barbaric and vengeful.

There is a difference between Justice and Revenge. 

Putting someone in prison for life costs tax payers money. If they are found guilty for killing someone they should be killed as well because they have no respect for human life and they should have their life taken away.

When you look at the current rate of mistakes on ppl sentenced to death (68 % between 73 and 95 according to columbia university research !!!) and methods sometimes use by police to get evidences, you know there is something very wrong with such an irreversible punishment.

At some point, I think members of a jury asking for capital punishment should also be sentenced to death if later on, proof is made they have killed an innocent man. Might be fun and interesting...

My opinion is that it should not be used. This due to the fact if you kill somebody, and they are later found to be innocent, you cannot bring them back. Whereas if you just put somebody into prison, you can compensate them, you may have ruined their life, but at least they can live.

 First off, do you know how much crap they buy with the taxpayer's money?

Secondly, not all murderers have "no respect for human life".

And thirdly, we aren't 12th century crusaders here. We should learn how to respect human life by not killing off anyone who is accused of a "very bad thing".