Wow. Quite a discussion.
I guess my thinking is this: people who were convicted of murder twenty or thirty years ago are now being cleared based on the advancement of DNA evidence. What scientific advancements are going to come in twenty or thirty years that will clear people who are convicted today? And if we kill someone today who we find out is innocent tomorrow... what does that do to our moral justification for using the death penalty?
Canada had the death penalty until the 1960s. Since it was abolished, the capital crime rate in Canada has actually fallen (on a per capita basis). (Just a little fact that I found interesting)
As always, I don't have the answers. I just have a lot of questions.
ML
