The death penalty doesn't support justice, it degrades and brutalises it. It is cruel, degrading and inhumane and such things can never be justified. Unfortunately, some people believe that if somebody takes a human life, they, in turn, deserve to forfeit their own. But we can't resort to the revenge of "an eye for an eye", because that only would make the punishment as unjust, as immoral and as barbaric as the original crime itself. And isn't one way of killing somebody just as bad as the other? What about the people who have just heard about such crimes and say, "killing is wrong, they should get the death penalty"? What's with that? Aren't they saying that somebody should be killed after they just said it was wrong? If somebody kills another person they deserve to lose their own lives? What about the person who injects the needle into the condemned, or the person who puts the noose around the criminal's neck, or the person who drops the platform, or even the jury who condemns the person to death because in a sense even they have killed somebody. Obviously it is right to protect the members of a society from those who would harm it. We simply can't live together if our property, our well being, and even our lives are at the mercy of evil doers. We need protection. But we don't need to kill the evil doer in order to provide that protection. All we have to do is take the evil doer out of circulation so that he or she can do no further harm. Supporters of capital punishment believe that since we created capital punishment and it's still out there, why not use it? Then again we also created the sanctity of life and that is the basic human right, to live, no matter what the situation. The sanctity of life was created after the death penalty, to allow people to have rights and make their own choices. Unfortunately this is often disregarded. .
Supporters also argue that as tax payers, why should we bear the cost of supporting such a criminal for a lifetime? Research has shown that life imprisonment is cheaper than capital punishment.