The Reason for Capital Punishment

Society teaches how bad an action is by the punishment it metes out. Only when a society takes the life of a murderer is it announcing in the clearest way possible that murder is the ultimate sin. Keeping every murderer alive makes no such announcement—even if it involves life imprisonment. Life in prison is a harsh punishment—but the murderer, while not free to leave prison, is allowed to keep his life.

Dennis Prager, The Rational Bible: Genesis: God, Creation, and Destruction, pg.122

A Society Without Capital Punishment

A society that lets premeditated murderers live—let alone paroles them from prison, as commonly occurs today—is, from the Bible’s perspective a polluted culture for “blood pollutes the land, and the land can have no expiation for blood that is shed on it, except by the blood of him who sheds it” (Numbers 35:33).

Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Biblical Literacy, pg.407

Death Penalty Unconstitutional?

The death penalty was also on the statute books of every single state when the Constitution was adopted.  The Founding Fathers who adopted the Bill of Rights banning "cruel and unusual punishment" did not have a problem implementing the death penalty.

Gregg Jackson, Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies, p.151

Oh, The Irony of the LEFT!

Liberals support the "right" of an abortionist to kill a woman's unborn baby; of the state to terminate life (euthanasia); and the intentional destruction of human embryos for scientific research (embryonic stem cell research), but don't support the death penalty for convicted murderers because they say that is cruel, unjust and inhumane.  The advocates of "choice" claim "innocent" people could unfairly die.

Gregg Jackson, Conservative Comebacks to Liberal Lies, p.142

Liberalism's Control of Life

Liberalism rejects the notion that God gives life and resents the notion that God controls death.  So liberals would seize that power and make matters of both life and death into questions of human choice.  We now understand why abortion and euthanasia have to be such major themes on the Left’s political landscape, in spite of the fact that polls repeatedly show that America is far from sanguine over the expanded practice of abortion.  In other words, the Left does not endorse abortion to win elections; it endorses abortion because that is its very purpose.  It is part of its religious principle, if you like.

We can also find the exception that proves the rule.  The Bible does give society one measure of control over life:  It authorizes capital punishment for certain crimes.  If human control over life and death, generically understood, were the underlying principle in the Left’s position on abortion and euthanasia, then wouldn’t liberalism fight for capital punishment as a logical extension of their principle?  Either society should have control over life and death or it should not.  But instead the liberal position opposes the death penalty at every turn, even, if the criminal himself desires to be executed.  This moral repugnance for imposing capital punishment is best explained by our hypothesis.  The biblical model says that we should welcome new life and revere elderly life, but the lives of murderers should be taken.  Liberalism turns this policy on its head: New life and elderly life, if unwanted, inconvenient, or medically challenged, should be taken while murderers should be spared.

Rabbi Daniel Lapin, "America's Real War," p.61