Do atheist belive in capital punishment

[Raeven]

Yai i'm alive! But what about all the money spent to keep a person in prison for the rest of their life? I assume thats what you want to do rather then release them? Imagine how much money could be saved!

Sorry, missed this before.

Wholly untrue, that it costs less to house someone in prison for a lifetime rather than try them for the death penalty.

The minute a case is declared a death case, the cost to try the defendant goes up astronomically. He/she is automatically entitled to a "death qualified" defense attorney, one who knows the ins and outs of that particular area of the law.

In the last death penalty case in which I participated, the defendant was assigned a total of three defense attorneys, one of whom was death qualified.

The case lasted two and a half years; we were required to change venue because the media coverage was so extreme and we couldn't get an impartial jury in our own county; we ran through something over 1,500 prospective jurors in the OTHER county in order to seat 18 death-qualified jurors (12 regular jurors and 6 alternates).... that's just the tip of the iceberg, and doesn't even take into account the extensive automatic appeals process to which a defendant is entitled once such sentence has been pronounced.

The expense argument doesn't fly. You could literally house a prisoner from age 18 to his death at a ripe old age and spend FAR less than running a death penalty case. If memory serves, the cost for that defendant's trial -- JUST the trial, not anything beyond the trial -- exceeded two million dollars.

Incidentally, that defendant remains on death row, still not executed. The death sentence was pronounced in 2002. He was a serial killer, made full confessions and there was zero doubt that he was the perpetrator of the crimes. He himself expressed a desire to be put to death for his deeds. This is not uncommon.

And I will also add that every single juror wept as I read out his death conviction. People who say it would be easy to impose the death penalty on a guilty defendant have never done it.