Lot of pro-death penalty folk here. Great logic, also. "Serial killers should be executed because they are monsters." Ok, that's fine. Kill the serial killers. You know that serial killers are quite rare and executing them won't do much for crime statistics. Fun story about a serial killer. I read that Ted Bundy purposely went to Florida to continue his murder spree because Florida had a death penalty and he wanted to die. He viscously attacked 5 women and a child. Three of them died among them a twelve year old girl. Florida executed Ted. Good job, Florida.
Executing prisoners is cheaper than housing prisoners? Really? In Texas the cost of executing a prisoner is over $2,000,000. That is about 3 times the cost of housing a prisoner in a maximum security facility for 40 years.
I believe that we execute people for all the wrong reasons. The reasons revolve mostly around good old revenge. What would happen if we started executing people based on how much damage they have caused to society? Take DuPont, for example. DuPont manufactured the wonder product Teflon using PFOA. DuPont knew in 1961 that PFOA is highly toxic and exposure to PFOA can lead to a long list of problems. DuPont willfully covered up the danger of PFOA for years and dumped almost 2,000,000 pounds of it on an unsuspecting public. The result? Cancer, birth defects, poisoned water supplies, and so on. In my opinion, if anybody deserved a death penalty it really wasn't Ted Bundy and his ilk. It was the executives and scientists at DuPont who covered up the dangers of PFOA. Instead, DuPont paid out about $700,000,000 while denying any wrong doing. Fun fact, virtually every person living in America today has measurable amounts of PFOA floating around their bodies. Thanks, DuPont!
I can think of a lot of white collar criminals who should face execution. Politicians who use their office to enrich themselves, fraudsters, doctors who perform unnecessary medical procedures for the insurance money, and so on. Execute a couple of these criminals and a whole lot of people would clean up their act. But if executing murderers and such - sometimes decades after the crime was committed - makes society feel better about itself, so be it.
