Life or Death?

Susanna over at cut on the bias has a couple of long but interesting posts on the death penalty.

The first deals with capital punishment in general and offers suggestions for reform while the second addresses the use of mitigating circumstances in sentencing by reference to a real murder trial and the deliberations of the jury.

Fascinating and disturbing reading.

Personally I’m against the death penalty, not because I’m soft on crime (I’m not) or because I think execution is a cruel and unusual punishment (I don’t) but because human fallibility, as Susanna rightly acknowledges, means that every so often we execute people who are innocent of the crime for which they were convicted.