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Other important work done:
http://www.innocenceproject.org/
edit: sad to see this thread flagged off the homepage.
But, in practice, we will never get it 100% right. Probability of killing an innocent person will always be >0.
For that reason alone, we should get rid of it.
The wrong people can be executed and unlike a prison sentence, there's no going back.
Appeals can last for decades and waste enormous amounts of time and money.
End the death penalty. It's just not worth it.
Note that this would only end it for crimes that fall under the state's jurisdiction. For things like transporting people across state lines to kill them or using a weapon of mass destruction in a manner detrimental to interstate commerce, the death penalty could still apply on a federal level.
I know all the arguments against the death penalty, but I just can't manage to get myself upset that there is a death penalty for such things.
That kind of incident makes the problem much more complicated. The typical argument against the death penalty is that sometimes innocent people are executed. And it's true, and it's horrible. But if you don't execute them, then the alternative is that they should be in prison for the rest of their life. If they're innocent, that's still pretty horrible. The real objective is to keep innocent people from being convicted in the first place.
But like many other situations, the false positive rate and the false negative rate are inversely correlated. How many guilty people should we free to avoid sending one innocent person to prison? The obvious answer is "as many as we have to" - it's not acceptable to have innocent people in prison. But if we're talking about serial killers, that question becomes "How many innocent people do we want to see dead on the streets to avoid sending one innocent person to prison?"
Back to the death penalty. Sometimes guilty people escape, too, and sometimes they kill people after they escape. Executed people don't kill anyone ever again. So, how many innocent people are you willing to execute in order to prevent innocent people dying on the streets?
This stuff is very difficult. But given less-than-perfect prisons, I can see a case for keeping the death penalty for serial killers.
California already removed the death penalty in 1972 then later reinstated it. This resulted in killers like Charles Mason being relieved from execution and denying many victim's family member from obtaining a measure of justice they wanted. Since being reinstated only 13 people have been executed. And none in the past 10 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_Californ...
That qualifies more as 'revenge' than as 'justice'.