There are many people who think that capital punishment is a good sentence for a deadly crime done by a convict. From the victim's family/friends point of view, the only thing they will mostly see is revenge, and that capital punishment is a very good idea to them. Their only reason for this decision is because of what the convict did to the victim. Although this is a very good reason, I do not believe that there is any reason to kill someone for their wrongdoing.
Capital punishment is a brutal, antiquated concept that must be abolished in the name of civilized society. A humane culture cannot abide the organized extermination of human beings in the name of justice. In the United States, dozens of people are put to death every year like stray animals, only perhaps in fewer humane ways. The methods of capital punishment vary greatly, but none have publicly accepted as humane. Society's support for the death penalty is decreasing, but there is still enough support in the United States to keep it legal in many states. The death penalty exercises only the most primal instincts to kill and extract revenge in an organized fashion.
The death penalty must be abolished completely to allow society to function in a civilized manner in which every person has the right to live. Capital punishment is very hypocritical in that the laws state that you aren't allowed to kill someone, yet when a person commits this crime, the government turns around and does exactly what the killer did. By allowing the organized killing of living human beings, the government is telling the public that they have the right to extinguish anyone they think is a murderer. By enforcing capital punishment, the government is telling the public that it is okay to kill as long as you have more power than the person being killed. This is of course a very cut-and-dried interpretation, but it is what the message comes down to.
