This guy sums up my feelings on the matter, probably better than my own rant.
Every time I start to waver on my support for the death penalty — as I did in the wake of another New Yorker piece, about a possibly-innocent man who was executed — I see a story like this and it snaps me right back into line. I’m all for containing prosecutorial abuses. I’m all for reforms to the way prosecutors seek the death penalty…
But those monsters — the animals who would do that to a family of human beings — don’t deserve to live…I want the state to wreak vengeance upon them. And, god help me, I want them to suffer when it happens. If this makes me a bad person, then so be it.
This is me as well. I’m basically in favor of the death penalty, and for more or less the same reason–vengeance. But I don’t think a needle in the arm does much to satisfy that part of me. I wish they could kneecap that Ft. Hood guy, but it sounds as if he wouldn’t feel it anyway.