1) I personally believe that the death penalty should be upheld and reinstated in places that it has been abolished. This is my belief based on my own sense of justice and what a civilized society should be. Prison is not a rehabilitation center. Though some prisons try, most prisons do not focus on rehabilitation. Prison is a punishment for wrong doing.
You should be punished according to your crime. If someone kills another person, or they hurt someone in an extreme way, that person should be put to death. It is justice for those they hurt, their families, and punishment for the person who committed the terrible act. It is not cruel and unusual punishment. They are getting the punishment they deserve based on what they did. Sitting on death row for so many years is not a cruel and unusual punishment either.
That is a right we give criminals in this country. Sitting in prison with their lives is due process. We give them the chance to appeal their cases. They should be thankful for that right which they would not get in other countries. It is ridiculous to me that this could be construed as cruel and unusual punishment.
2) The death penalty has recently become an increasingly controversial aspect within our justice system as many people have come to disagree with its implementation on both moral and monetary grounds, however, I personally believe that it is wholly necessary for our society to maintain the death penalty as a result of the role that it fulfills for both the government and the individual.
The government utilizes the death penalty as a means of ensuring that extraordinarily immoral individuals are appropriately punished for their heinous actions and to instill a sense of authority within the minds of the populace that is intended to display the amount of control that the state truly wields in regards to your life. Were the government to abolish the death penalty, then there is a genuine potential for individuals that were victims ( either directly or indirectly) of these crimes to become disillusioned by their government's presumed complacency towards criminals, and, as a result of this, decide to murder these degenerates themselves.
Although the effects of the death penalty upon crime rates are largely disputed, it should be evident that the death penalty is not a matter of deterring crime, but rather of maintaining the fragile balance between the citizens and the social contract that is present within our society, for it provides a sense of closure for those closest to the victim whilst simultaneously easing the collective conscious of society through ensuring that another dangerous individual's existence has been erased.
While some might argue against the death penalty for its purported "immorality", it should be evident that there is a subset of the population that is either amoral or mentally unstable enough so as to present a constant threat to the whole of society were they ever released again.
Although one could certainly make the point that such people deserve to live out their lives and to undergo extensive psycho-therapy in the the effort to rehabilitate them, many are naturally inclined to remain in their current delusional state simply as a result of their own mental deficiencies that were present from birth.
As such, it would be a far more efficient and effective use of state's resources to execute these deranged individuals so as to properly reallocate the therapists to departments that could actually improve the mental well-being of those that would benefit from it significantly more, such as the victims of rape, assault, domestic abuse, or those that committed less serious crimes.