>yet another example of why to abolish the death penalty.
>
>The last few years my views have changed a bit on capital punishment. For cases like Tsarnaev and the Fort Hood Shooter, where there's zero (and I mean ZERO) doubt, I'm still for it.

I understand the logic - but the problem with that is that the death penalty is applied unfairly too - like WHEN does the prosecutor decide to do this? i.e., minorities end up with a capital case way more than white defendants. Plus just the simple morality of it all - society says we're not supposed to kill - so it doesn't seem right that we should let the government get away with it either. They try to make it look more like a medical procedure now, but at the end of the day your still killin a guy (or woman).

>But anything short of that, I'd rather have life in prison, since obviously you can release the person and make restitution if a mistake had been made in the trial.

That true - to an extent. Yes if the person is still alive you can set them free - but as far as restitution - well that depends. Some states have enacted laws that limit the amount these victims can sue for - and its a rather low number, less per year than many of us on this forum make - and we're not locked up away 24/7 either. Then of course if this happened to the person due to prosecutorial misconduct there isn't going to be any accountability for what happened because they're immune from getting any sort of criminal or civil case as a result of such misconduct. Sometimes they will pick a dirty cop to though under the bus - but even this is somewhat rare. Good example is the gross misconduct in the Timothy Masters case..the two lying creep prosecutors and lying cop basically got away with it. There are also examples of when they let someone go because they found out ooops wrong guy - but force the person to make an weird type of plea agreement (and Alford plea) to get out - and taaadaa that means now that person cant sue.
Of course these are two different issues - death penalty vs misconduct - but as since misconduct does happen (how rare it is we may never know for sure) then capital punishment is a really stupid thing to have under such circumstances. As I said though I see the point you make as well - zero doubt cases, but then there are issues of why pick this one instead of that one, does the person have an IQ of 30 and not understand what they did? etc etc. I'd rather just remove all doubt and simply not kill anyone.