10 Reasons Why We Should End Capital Punishment (videos)

Can a modern, educated, affluent, civil society do better than this?

End capital punishment because it is not a proven deterrent to murder.
End capital punishment because it’s very existence has more to do with anger and vengeance than with justice.
End capital punishment to make sure that no innocent lives are taken because police, prosecutors and the victim’s family needed to blame and punish someone, anyone!
End capital punishment because it’s very existence is a desecration of the value we individually and collectively claim to place on human life.
End capital punishment because it reinforces the primitive notion that messy, complicated problems can be solved through the use of force and violence.
End capital punishment to teach our children that we really do value life and that we believe that it is our God-given responsibility to treat all lives as sacred. It is not the right of any person to decide who does or who does not have the right to live in this world. Lethal force should only be employed in defense of innocent life.
End capital punishment because two wrongs don’t make a right. Wanting to protect society from evil doesn’t give society the right to do evil.
End capital punishment because our own sense of human dignity and decency is not expendable. We should never surrender that, which makes us civilized human beings, to anyone or anything, including (and especially) our emotions. The echoes of anger and the desire for revenge that can be detected in the voices of the survivors who say that capital punishment gives them “closure” reminds us that emotional gratification and anger are very different things.
End capital punishment because as much as we’d like to believe that justice is blind, the facts are that more times than not, cultural biases and prejudices influence capital punishment cases, and those who can’t afford quality legal aid are inevitably more vulnerable to a process that is often more interested in getting a conviction than getting to the truth.
End capital punishment because, contrary to the myth promoted by its supporters, it DOES NOT save society from the expense of a life-time incarceration. In fact, the truth is just the opposite: The expenditures incurred by the numerous appeals of those sentenced death, inevitably cost our legal system more than a life-time of incarceration.