Peter Singer makes a salient point:
Retribution is often seen as a more important justification for the death penalty. It is quite common for family members of the victim to watch the execution of the person convicted of killing their relative, and afterwards to pronounce themselves satisfied that justice has been done – it happened again with the execution of Troy Davis. In the rest of the Western world, the desire to witness an execution is widely regarded as barbaric, and barely comprehensible. The idea that the families of murder victims cannot obtain “closure” until the murderer has been executed seems not to be a universal human truth, but a product of a particular culture – perhaps not even American culture as a whole, but rather the culture of the American South, where 80% of all executions take place.
Chart from a new Gallup poll finding the "the lowest level of support [for the death penalty] since 1972, the year the Supreme Court voided all existing state death penalty laws in Furman v. Georgia."
The Dish 
