After keeping him in prison for literally half his life, Georgia executed a 72 year old man.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

167. Um, no. It's not.

While there are some very troubling aspects of the correctional system in the US, the mere fact that someone is incarcerated in a prison is not in and of itself barbaric. Segregating a person away from society for having committed a violent offense, while still providing very basic human rights guarantees to that person, serves both a protective and punitive interest.

You talk about "forfeiting any claim to their own life" and "exacting the full measure of what the murderer actually deserves." I find it very troublesome for some human beings to claim such a life-and-death godlike role over others, even over people who are extremely flawed. And I think your argument falls apart on your claim of "the worth of the victim" because the system as it stands right now seems to value certain victims lives more than others. Apparently, some crimes are worthy of the death penalty, and others are not, because not all people convicted of criminal homicides are sentenced to death. You use flowery language life "snuffed out an innocent life", "destroying a family, a dream, a child's security". But unless you are willing to extend such a notion to all criminal homicides, are you not being hypocritical? A guy could have a few too many drinks, get behind the wheel of the car, and crash into the father or mother of a young family, killing that person. Under your claim, since he "snuffed out an innocent life" and "destroyed a family, a dream, a child's security", wouldn't he too be deserving of death and not simply imprisonment? Are you prepared to support the death penalty for DUI manslaughter? What if the homicide victim is elderly? Childless? A real scumbag himself? Do you see the problem with your thinking?

As for lethal injections being barbaric, yes, they are indeed barbaric. Any method of death in the death penalty is barbaric. A condemned person could be given a soft down bed and listen to calm, soothing music while he is injected with poison and it would still be barbaric. Because the act of unnaturally ending a person's life absent exigent circumstances (i.e. imminent threat to one's own life or the lives of others) is inherently barbaric, illogical and wrong. Just because the means themselves might not seem overly barbaric does not excuse the inanity of the act of killing the person.

One final note: people who support the death penalty usually throw out as justifications that they think it will give the victim's family some closure, or that the condemned person "deserves it", or that they are saving society from having to support the incarceration of a convicted person. In other words, the death penalty is okay because "it feels good." And last I checked, killing a person because it "feels good" is something that we're supposed to be repulsed at, not advocate.