[Bells]

This is quite a useful topic for me, seeing as I just came back from a Criminal Law course at a nearby university!

There's always going to be fors and againsts. But we were told about how in Texas alone, over the last century alone, hundreds of people have been executed when they were actually proven innocent afterwards. Whilst people like Ian Huntley etc. certainly are vile criminals, bringing the death penalty back might result in a similar way - you're still taking away innocent lives. Additionally, sometimes in death penalty cases, the lawyers tend to make decisions about people and crimes they'll do before they have even done them, i.e. saying they'll be a threat to society, e.g. 'this person has committed a grave crime, and we feel they will be a risk to people in future and may do it again, therefore we must execute this person.' How can you say something like that though? You could say you could get a psychiatrist in to analyse what the criminal really thinks, but how far is that reliable? You're still taking it for granted when you can't really afford to do that, and that's another point to weaken the death penalty issue.