Originally Posted by Jensen

You are wrong. http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/as...0152008eng.pdf

Read and learn. Many governments actively promote the death penalty as vital for crime control. They claim that the threat of executions deters criminals from committing violent crime.

From the PDF:

MYTH - The death penalty deters violent crime and makes society safer.

FACT - Evidence from around the world has shown that the death penalty has no
unique deterrent effect on crime. Many people have argued that abolishing the
death penalty leads to higher crime rates, but studies in the USA and Canada,
for instance, do not back this up.

Far from making society safer, the death penalty has been shown to have a brutalizing
effect on society. State sanctioned killing only serves to endorse the use of force
and to continue the cycle of violence.