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I'm opposed to the death penalty for two reasons.
Violent crime, rapes, murders, aggravated violence, terrorism and so forth occurs in countries without the death penalty, murders with firearms happen less in most western countries that don't have the death penalty compared to the United States. As a deterrent to committing crime the death penalty doesn't work.
The second reason is that the judicial system gets things wrong. There are cut and dried cases where it's obvious that the person charged with a crime is guilty without any room for doubt (think Charles Manson) however in most cases there are protracted investigations that lead to a brief of evidence and that evidence is all that a decision of guilt can be made upon in court. There have been enough cases in the US legal system where convictions have been overturned (sometimes after decades) to consider that the risk of putting an innocent person to death is too much of a possibility.
TLDR: Death penalty doesn't add to deterrence. Some people found guilty have their convictions overturned because the legal system got it wrong.
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