I don't think this is a stupid question.
The pro-life camp defends the rights of the fetus because of the sanctity of life... but apparently the sanctity of life stops once the state has determined that certan crimes have been committed...
Isn't is up to God to judge us?
Didn't Jesus himself made it quite clear that those who society shuns as sinners are still as dear to him because they are human beings?
I made a post about the death penalty in a thread in Politics, I'll add a bit from what I said there to here:
There are four basic reasons why we punish criminals:
Firstly, there is the detterrence - we don't want people to do these things so we put in place strong punishments.
Secondly, there is retribution - we punish people to the proportion of the crime they committed.
Thirdly, there is rehabilitation - the punishment should be of such a strength and manner as to reform the criminal.
Fourthly, there is protection - the punishment should protect the community from being victimised again.
The death penalty only truly responds to the second and the fourth. I would argue, however, that the removal of a person from society by putting them in gaol robs them of the life of liberty which they robbed of their victims, and so is also a sound way to address that element of punishment. These crimes can not be committed when the person is separated from society by being in prison, so society is also protected by a life sentence. 0.5% of American inmates "escape" prison each year, but of those the vast majority are simply walkouts from community correction facilities - these aren't the people we are talking about here. From federal prisons only 1 person out of 115,000 has escaped gaol since 1999 and he was recaptured.
Compare that to the fact that since 1973, 125 people have been released off death row in America as they were innocent of the crime they were convicted for. From a quick internet search I found that up until 1987 there were 23 cases in America where people had been killed and proven innocent after the fact.
It is clearly demonstrable by comparing very similar communities with and without the death penalty that there is no correlation between the rate of crime and the type of penalty for those crimes, so you can not argue that the death penalty is any more of a deterrent than a life sentence.
The death penalty obviously offers no hope of rehabilitation.
When I try to balance that all up I see a punishment that doesn't fulfill all that we want to achieve with the punishing of criminals, and I see a punishment that, where it does have "success" (in retributive and preventative terms) there is an option available, life imprisonment, which does just about exactly the same thing, without the potentially disastrous results for those who are innocent of the crimes that they are convicted.
On that balance, I can't accept the death penalty.
