First of all, I think it should be stated that the death penalty is a barbaric act and very much part or the legacy of medieval torture. Even lethal injection a supposedly humane form of execution has proven to be barbaric. There have been instances where this method has taken half an hour to actually kill the person. So even this is a slow agonizing death. All the other forms are as bad as or worse than lethal injection.
I think that Robert Boyle, who commented above, is dead on when he spoke about the race and class bias of the death penalty. In capitalism, the state, which includes the cops, military, courts and prison, serves to defend the rule of the capitalist class against the working class and the oppressed.
American capitalism had the enslavement of blacks by whites built into it from it's inception. Racial oppression, namely black oppression, is the bedrock of American capitalism. Blacks and Latino's are disproportionately represented in the prison population and on death row. As the writer, former Black Panther and MOVE supporter pointed out in his book Live from Death row, the chance of a black person receiving the death penalty for killing a white person is much higher than a white person receiving the death penalty for killing a black person.
There are also plenty of cases of innocent people on death row. And it doesn't do a thing to reduce crime. The US has a much higher crime rate than Canada and West Europe and the former country has the death penalty and the latter countries don't.
There is also the fact that the criminals and the cops and other state apparatchiks are not necessarily separate entities. A third of the police in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania have been implicated by the FBI for having ties with the mob. In the south of the US the cops have a history of working hand-in-hand with the Ku Klux Klan!
(This is in response to the following article http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/defending-the-undefendable/201106/the-death-penalty)
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