In a civilized society the death penalty is an act of barbarity. How you kill a human being whether chopping off the head, crucifixion, gassing, poisoning, garroting, shooting, stoning, or flaying alive reflects the level of barbarous thinking. If killing another human being is wrong, it is wrong whether an individual or the state does it. The death penalty achieves nothing and does not deter a would be killer. The statistics prove it. So why do it? A cheap sense of gratification? A ghoulish emotion of witnessing someone die? Satisfying the destructive emotion of revenge? The death penalty is a waste of time and money. Two wrongs never make a right. Revenge is self-defeating and does not work except to produce ever more death and destruction as the Israel/Palestine conflict demonstrates. Those who cry for it and pursue it and inflict it are uncivilized and barbaric and each person who does should look squarely in the mirror and ask, "What sort of a person am I? Am I the same as the person who killed or am I better than that?" It is in pardoning that we are pardoned, in forgiving that we are forgiven, and by loving the sinner though we hate the sin we are in turn loved.