Capital punishment IS a deterrent: the executed are effectively deterred from ever committing another crime. [Robert Heinlein] Much of the need for it could be avoided if more victims exterminated their attackers. Si vis pacem, parabellum. (If you want peace, prepare for war.) Draw first blood, and forfeit your life. The Liberal media won't tell you that Portland Oregon recently passed a Covered Carry law. (I don't like the word concealed. It sounds like one is doing something they shouldn't.) Anyone without a criminal record may carry a lethal weapon. For those who hesitate to carry handguns, non-lethal pulse wave and other devices are available. What happened? The crime rate dropped 30% in the first reporting period. And look at Florida. The Liberal media won't. Not even the hypocritical Liberal media who are carrying.

A person's life is their most valuable possession. Don't they have the right to decide what happens to someone who takes it from them? Why don't potential murder victims (that includes all of us) decide the punishment in their will, or have their friends and family decide? The only limit would be human imagination. A person who causes an accidental death could be required to spend the rest of their life reducing the possibility of similar accidents. Victims might choose a lifetime of slave labor for the "perp" with the proceeds to go to the victim's estate. Slaves could be owned and bought and sold by people but not by corporations or the government. Poetic justice would be execution by the same method used on the victim. The prohibition against Cruel and Unusual Punishment was to protect political protesters from being drawn and quartered by a king or any excessively powerful government. A murderer who tortured a victim to death could expect a lifetime of being tortured. Sadists would gladly pay for their pleasure.

We could utilize the method used in Medieval Germany. The executee was not given a date for his execution. When the prisoner was let out of his cell to perform his daily ablutions, the executioner, hiding in an alcove or side passage, would surprise him with a fatal whack on the back of his head with a large wooden mallet. Death was instantaneous and painless. Even our lethal injection method doesn't come close for humaneness and lack of apprehension on the victim's part. How different would The Stranger have been if Albert Camus had known this?

Let's televise executions - on Pay Per View TV. Again, with the proceeds to go to the victim's estate. The public is free to witness executions in the Bahamas and Arab countries and other countries probably too numerous to mention. They were in England until about 1900. Apparently the Victorians wanted to deprive the masses of that pleasure.

Cardinal O'Connor said ". . . we have to exhaust every defense for the person accused, however much it costs, however long it takes." He's very generous with other people's money and time. As for it costing more to execute someone than a lifetime's imprisonment, do away with the nearly endless expen$ive appeals that feed parasitic lawyers at the expense of We the People. It doesn't have to cost anything to exterminate two-legged vermin. A mallet would last a long time. People would happily donate cartridges or rope or some of their automobile's exhaust gas. How many people? Survey says . . . "Let's take a survey." A survey of a full spectrum of the people might surprise the Liberal media. Allow vermin the option of being medically disassembled for transplantation so they will benefit someone. Televise it and bidders could call in. Or make it mandatory as in China. Their organs could be sold with the proceeds to go to, you guessed it, their victim's estate. Not to the State, as happens in China. An innocent person executed by mistake could think of it as premature reincarnation.