Here in the U.K, capital punishment was in effect abolished in 1969; it was stopped for murder, but remained for really rare offences such as assassination of reigning monarch or burning of a Royal Navy shipyard. It was truly abolished (ie taken off the statute books) around about the turn of the century in accordance to the European Convention of Human Rights.
Myself, I'm against capital punishment, if a mistake has been made, the defendant cannot return to ordinary life because of the obvious fact that he/she is dead. Such a cock up on a monumental scale occurred during the 1st World War. Basically, many men became shell shocked while on the front line, as it was accepted as a condition the army saw it as cowardice. The punishment for cowardice as death by firing squad and I'll leave it to you to work out what happened to thousands of innocent soldiers.
