The Death Penalty is both Cruel (murderous) AND Unusual (only Civilized Nation employing it) punishment. It is thereby unconstitutional. Beyond that basic logic, the well-recorded murder of innocents and the extreme cost (see below) make it an untenable position for a modern Nation to establish as policy.The Death Penalty must be ended.
It costs far more to execute a person than to keep him or her in prison for life. A New Jersey Policy Perspectives report concluded that when the state had the death penalty, it cost New Jersey taxpayers $253 million since 1983, a figure that is over and above the costs that would have been incurred had the state utilized a sentence of life without parole instead of death. (New Jersey abolished capital punishment in December 200; http://www.ncadp.org/)