(Even) Turkey abolishes the death penalty!

[DanS]

"well the fact that there is now one country less with the death penalty in the world, and that the US is now part of an even smaller minority, should probably be create some discussion inside the US, isnt it?"

MarkG: Afraid to disappoint you, but it will likely have zero impact on the discourse. Personally, I wonder why you think it would, since we aren't trying to join the EU.

Americans tend to look at it pretty narrowly on the merits. The thing that is changing public opinion fastest is that some were executed who were later exonerated, or at least a great deal of doubt was raised after they were executed by DNA evidence.

Focusing on the peer pressure aspects, as Euros like to do, has remarkably little currency here.

[Dinner]

This my surprise you, but probably not, however most people out side the EU couldn't care less about the EU's anti-death penality ruckas. Each sovereign country has the right to determine whither or not the death penality is appropriate. The EU can demand an anti-death penalty law as the price of admission but it will have no effect upon countries which do not wish to join the EU.

For every flawed, politically motivated study which says the death penalty doesn't work as a deterent I can point to another flawed, politically motivated study that says it does; all that is left is good science and sound science points to the death penalty working as a viable means of deterent in the vast majority of cases. That in an of itself tells me that the death penality is useful and justified.

[MarkG]

DanS, see paiktis posts on this

Oerdin, see the canada facts posted earlier...