Bring back Tookie's victims, then we'll talk.

From Ruminations on America:

An execution is not simply death. It is just as different from the privation of life as a concentration camp is from prison. It adds to death a rule, a public premeditation known to the future victim, an organization which is itself a source of moral sufferings more terrible than death. Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life."

--Albert Camus

Hogwash. This is a lot of the nonsense that passes for postmodernist truth. What it really does is to turn the question of guilt on society rather than on criminals. Camus sounds like one of those guys who convinced the Emperor in the story that they were making him a new suit of clothes. The more counter-intuitive something is, the more it appeals to people like him and Noam Chomsky. It gives them a nice sense of intellectual superiority, but all it really does is demonstrate that too much learning can make one mad.