Qualifying my Death Penalty Stance

Hokey Dinah... the last few weeks I've been prattling on about killun' people. Not innocent people, mind you, but murderous fiends like Arafat.
After reading this post by the Warmonger, I decided that maybe I need to clarify something. I don't think we should kill everyone convicted of first degree murder. There needs to be some mercy in judicial system, even for the most heinous of crimes. We need to give people the opportunity to redeem (for lack of a better term) themselves.

But I disagree with the Warmonger as well. He says, in part:

"I believe that Scott Peterson should not be visiting Arafat in hell anytime soon. All evidence convicting him was circumstantial. Granted, there was a huge pile of circumstantial evidence but there still could have been a way, a remote way, that it might not have been him. Do we really want to kill an innocent man? People in America are sent to death row every year that are not guilty of the crime they were charged with. Innocent people have been killed. There is no justification for this."

(emphasis mine)

Scott Peterson is, as they say in Latin, Scummus Erectus Maximus. A simeball of the highest magnitude. Although Arafat is in a league of his own, that does not make what Peterson did any less horrendous. That poor baby. As Neil Young once said:

"That's one more kid that'll never go to school, never get to fall in love, never get to be cool"

He is responsible for taking two lives, one of which never even had a chance to see the light of day. When I think of this fact, it makes what the Warmonger says later on even more important:

There's no reason we should have to wait 20 years to take someone out of this world that desperately needs it. The thing that gets in the way most of the time is the appeals process. Even if there was a signed confession, murder weapon, videotape, DNA evidence, and 50 witnesses they still get to appeal their case. I don't want to see that part go away because it sometimes helps those that are innocent go free but we should really fast track the ones that really need killin'.

Yes, we really should.