>>Also, the other side of handling the cases: what happens to the perpetrators? The proponents of death penalty as a deterrent somehow fail to impose any harsh penalty on their own delinquents.
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>Uhh...I think you are linking two unrelated things.
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>Personally, I would queue up to pull the trigger on Mssrs. Custer and Battle. However, what they did, compared to the others you mention, is IMHO much more severe, and warrants much more serious punishment. (And I would argue about DeLay - didn't like him, but I'm not sure he's guilty of anything really severe).

I think it IS related, or just exposes the bigotry of the whole nomenklatura. On one side they tout the death penalty as the necessary measure to deter violent crime, and yet do nothing, or do even less than nothing to deter crime in their own ranks. "Less than nothing" is not to be read separately from "to deter" - it's when they defend their own bad apples as long as they can.