Your scholars certainly haven't proven those 8 to be innocents executed. As you said, they believe, like those Texas cases. Belief is very different than proof and evidence.

There is no proof of an innocent executed in the US, at least since 1900. However, the proof is overwhelming and uncontradicted that many innocents have been murdered by those murderers we have allowed to live.

As you may not know, the Cantu claims were thorughly reviewed for about a year and a report was issued, finding the claims of innocence to be wthout merit. That is routine with the overwhelming majority of these claims, which are usually the product of vivid imagination, one sider reviews and/or outright deceptions.

You mention lifers have not murdered any corrections officers in your home state for 26 years. What is your home state? . How many prison guards, other priso personel, visitors, and other prisoners were murdered or harmed by lifers during that period? How many lifers escaped and harmed and/or murdered others during and after their escape?

District attorneys fight and are successful in opposing the reopening of cases of alleged actual innocence because they prevail on the fact issues and for no other reason. We don't want to reopen cases based upon frivolous evidence, do we? And we want cases reopended when the evidence merits it, as well.

I think you misinterpret the Supreme Court when it comes to executing innocent people. Obviously, it is unconstitutional to execute an innocent person, when the evidence shows they are innocent.

And there are specific guidlines in all states, when dealing with evidence of mental illness.

I don't know where you get your "facts", but I suggest that you fact check them before presenting them.

I was only dealing with deterrence and the two additonal ways in which the death penalty protects innocents more than a life sentnce.

The foundation for the death penalty is the same as it is for all other sanctions, that is a just and appropriate sanction for the crime committed.

This really doesn't benefit the anti side, at all. The antis long abandoned their moral arguement as a usable tool in their arsenal, because it didn't work. They now attack the implementation of the death penalty, arguing that it just isn't supportable because of various systemic errors. However, the pros have proven virtually all of those arguements to be false

I agree with your additonal evaluations.

And therein lies the crux of the issue. Arguments that relegate the death penalty simply to a pragmatic discussion of whether it deters unwittingly give credence to the anti-death penalty crowd. I.e., it doesn't address the inherent issue of justice or morality – only a set of actuarial statistics that make the death penalty appropriate or inappropriate based simply on statistical evidence. That turns it from a discussion on morality to a discussion for actuaries.

Death penalty opponents are quick to dismiss proponents as childish and brutish – people who merely want vengeance. Sadly, many even use the Bible to support this notion that those who believe in capital punishment are less charitable, forgiving, and merciful.

The death penalty predates Leviticus and the 10 commandments. Nor did the New Testament somehow "set aside" this law. One of government’s primary functions in scripture is to appropriately wield the sword.

The problem with those who start pontificating about "mercy over justice" is that they always focus on the individual, never on the larger unmerciful implications for society as a whole. When we "spare" a life, how many others are we sacrificing in the process through the environment we create?

And why, if life without parole is worse than death (as some insist), do those in prison work so feverishly to prolong their life through endless appeals? And why do those same death penalty opponents typically fight so hard for “humane” conditions in prisons? Something doesn’t add up there.

The human psyche is wired to have an innate sense of justice just as surely as it is wired to seek and understand love and validation. We don't have to be taught that something is unjust. We simply know it, and this is why children in particular are masters at knowing whether their sibling has one more microgram of ice cream on their cone or two more marshmallow chunks in their bowl of Lucky Charms cereal. When this innate sense of justice is continually assaulted by a legal system that under-punishes, the collective psyche of the governed begins to change.

This is why the Bible so often links the concepts of justice and national despair in so many places.

I could list a dozen pragmatic reasons why the death penalty is appropriate. But those types of arguments should simply be the practical evidence of the inherent morality of capital punishment – not the philosophical basis for it.

Because innocents are at risk of executions, some wrongly presume that innocents are better protected implementing a life without parole sentence, instead.
 
What many forget to do is weigh the risk to innocents within a life sentence. When doing that, we find that innocents are more at risk with a life sentence.
 
First, we all know that living murderers, in prison, after escape or after our failures to incarcerate them, are much more likely to harm and murder, again, than are executed murderers. 
 
Secondly, no knowledgeable party questions that the death penalty has the most extensive due process protections in US criminal law.

Therefore, it is logically conclusive, that actual innocents are more likely to be sentenced to life imprisonment and more likely to die in prison serving under that sentence, that it is that an actual innocent will be executed.
 
Thirdly, 12 recent studies, inclusive of their defenses, find for death penalty deterrence. Some believe that all studies with contrary findings negate those 10 studies. They don't. Studies which don't find for deterrence don't say no one is deterred, but that they cannot measure those deterred, if they are.
 
Ask yourself: "What prospect of a negative outcome doesn't deter some?" There isn't one, although committed anti death penalty folk may say the death penalty is the only one. However, the premier anti death penalty scholar accepts it as a given that the death penalty is a deterrent, but does not believe it to be a greater deterrent than a life sentence. I find the evidence compelling that death is feared more than life – even in prison.

In choosing to end the death penalty, or in choosing not implement it, some have chosen to put more innocents at risk.
 
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Furthermore, possibly we have sentenced 20-25 actually innocent people to death since 1973, or 0.3% of those so sentenced. Those have been released upon post conviction review. There is no proof of an innocent executed in the US, at least since 1900.

Of all the governments programs in the world, that put innocents at risk, is there one with a safer record? Unlikely.