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"I suppose you were against the Iraq War too?? I mean.. innocents died, so you must of been against locking up Saddam Hussein."

It is a matter of what is necessary for which goals. Regarding the innocents who died in the Iraq war, those deaths, tragically, were necessary for removing a tyrant who was a vital threat to huge numbers of people in both his nation and ours.

Regarding punishment of murderers, the goals are direct prevention (by keeping those who have murdered before off the street so they can't do it again) and general prevention via deterrence, at the minimum cost possible without sacrificing accuracy. (This knowledge, the knowledge that punishing a criminal is vitally important for preventing future crimes, is in the tradition of Western Civilization going back to the Socratic dialogues, and it is bolstered today by study at the intersection of biology, psychology, and game theory.)

Direct prevention can be achieved not only by the death penalty, but also by life imprisonment without parole, providing the government makes such a sentence a real life sentence with no loophole outs.

Some deterrence is achieved by life imprisonment. Arguably, more deterrence is achieved by the death penalty, on the assumption that most people consider being killed as worse that being imprisoned. However, arguably, only negligibly more deterrence is achieved by the death penalty, on the assumption that there are diminished returns beyond life imprisonment - the idea is that living in cell for the entire rest of your life is bad enough that, if a person is thinking clearly enough to be swayed at all by a deterrent, life in prison is plenty of deterrent. According to this argument, if that's not enough of a deterrent, more won't help much, because you're probably not dealing with a very aware person. So, the extent of any extra benefit of the death penalty over life in prison is disputable.

Now, cost and accuracy. In order to have the death penalty and have only a small number of innocent people put to death, you have to have heck of a lot of checks and chances for appeal. This costs a tremendous amount of taxpayer money.

So, basically, the point is that those conservatives who argue against the death penalty usually do so, not on the basis of utopian pacifism, but on the basis of the idea that the death penalty confers nothing much more than real no-parole life sentences do, and at a much greater cost, in terms of either innocent people dead (if done on the cheap without lots of legal checks) or in terms of taxpayer funds (if done with the many expensive legal checks).

I'm not necessarily trying to convince you of this, but at least understand that when a conservative has a problem with the death penalty, they quite likely have serious reasons for it. Treating them as if they were in the ranks of the utopian pacifist moonbats at DU is usually uncalled for.

(And for the record, this is totally meant in the context citizens debating preferred policy, not in the context of duties of judges and justices. In that context, the duties of the judge or justice are bound by the Constitution and by the decisions of the citizens and their representatives.)