Well, being from Massachusetts, which is liberal as hell, it would cost much more money to put a prisoner to death than to keep them for life in prison w/o the possibility of parole, due to the number of appeals. That being said, I still support it, if states executed similar to the way Texas does it..
Either way, YOU ARE going to die by the state's hands.
Most people eligible for the death penalty are violent offenders, so they're going to be kept in solitary confinement for the majority, if not all, of their prison sentence anyway.
The prisoners in solitary are basically going to go insane (if they're not already..) and begin develop psychological problems due to isolation from the rest of the prison population. It is, in a sense, torture, which goes against the eight amendment's protection against cruel and unusual punishment.. So I don't get why people are saying the state has no right to take a life when they're basically doing the same thing, but instead torturing them precedently. But, on the other hand, I kinda see where the victims seeking retribution are coming from when they say that letting them rot in prison would be the preferred form of punishment..
I'll link the article if I can find it, but I read a study that was done on POW's kept in detention camps in Yugoslavia in 1992. It showed that prisoner's who were kept in isolation for prolonged periods of time suffered the same amount, if not more, brain damage than prisoners that were physically beaten causing head trauma that could render them unconscious.
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