The Death Penalty is NOT the maximum possible vengeance for people who seek it as vengeance

[AZ Progressive]

I've never understood this, that people would think that the death penalty is the worst possible punishment. I can see a case for if the person is such a danger to society that they might as well be executed, but as vengeance, as revenge? Hell no.

Solitary confinement is far worse than death

http://solitarywatch.com/2013/03/11/voices-from-solitary-a-sentence-worse-than-death/

No matter what the world would think about things that they cannot imagine in even their worst nightmares, I know that twenty-five years in solitary confinement is utterly and certainly cruel, moreso than death in or by an electric chair, gas chamber, lethal injection, bullet in the head, or even immolation could possibly be. The sum of the suffering caused by any of these quick deaths would be a small thing next to the sum of the suffering that this quarter-century in SHU has brought to bear on me. Solitary confinement for the length of time that I have endured it, even apart from the inhuman conditions that I have too often been made to endure it in, is torture of a terrible kind; and anyone who doesn’t think so surely knows not what to think.

The Death Penalty can be even seen as an escape from punishment

http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=90935

"He does not see the death sentence as punishment. He sees it as an escape from punishment," Savitz said before Passaro's lethal injection. "He believes that he will be reunited with his first wife and the child that he killed, Maggie. He wants to die and has gotten the state to help him carry it out in what is essentially a state-assisted suicide. He is not doing this because he feels a sense of remorse."

Not to mention a prize for people who seek to be martyrs


More:

http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2012/09/25/why-death-row-inmates-oppose-life-without-parole/

Less explicitly discussed but quite clear from the above, is how punishing a true LWOP sentence is. The prospect of never being released from prison ever, with not even a low odds hope for an appeal or a parole board decision in your favor, is terribly terribly punishing. In California it is compounded by the fact that prison conditions are extremely poor due to overcrowding and in recent years according to the Supreme Court, the prospect of torture through abysmal or non-existent medical treatment (see Brown v. Plata). Death row inmates in California have a cell to themselves, receive more attentive supervision and visits from their lawyers, not to mention a measure of international celebrity and the scores of pen pals that brings. All of that disappears when your death sentence is vacated (as all of them would be should Prop 34 pass), and you get dumped into the long dark tunnel known as LWOP. In short, just as Cesare Beccaria argued more 200 years ago in his On Crimes and Punishment, true life is worse than death as a punishment, and thus as a deterrent.

[DonCoquixote]

1. the last thing you want to giove a martyr

is death, because they will gain the vanity they call living forever.

You want to have this asshole shoveling shit and put it on you tube. No galmour, no coolness, no love.

[AZ Progressive]

2. You can't trust Americans to do the smart thing...

[Aerows]

3. Stick him in solitary confinement

and feed him Loaf for the rest of his life.

If that isn't adequate punishment for destroying the many lives he was a party to murdering, dismembering, and the pain of their families, I fail to see what would be worse. I would hope he would live a good 40 years like that, since he is a very young man.

[mythology]

4. I don't know if I buy that

I don't know of any cases where somebody asked to be moved from life without parole to the death penalty voluntarily.