Kill and Murder are not the same?I kill you, I murder you. For me Kill and murder are the same. You can't change that. After the death is decided if it was intentional, or not. If i intentionally killed you or intentionally murdered you.
@xerox - This is a very important point. Fish actually linked to the thread where I tried to explain the distinction there, but I'll give a brief distinction here.
Murder is a kind of killing - it's wrongful killing. In other words, someone who murders does something immoral. This isn't true of every case of killing. Here are some cases that are (intuitively, at least) killing, but not murder.
Case 1: Two soldiers are fighting for their respective countries in a war. Both are shooting at one another. But soldier A shoots and kills soldier B. While solider A intentionally kills soldier B, this isn't a case of murder.
Case 2: An armed bank robber is fleeing from police and shooting at them. An officer shoots and kills the robber. Again, he doesn't murder the robber.
Case 3: Sue is attacked by a would-be mugger. He pulls a knife to stab her, at which point she pulls out a gun and kills him.
Notice that intentionality doesn't play a part here. In all of these cases, the person doing the killing does so intentionally. You're right that, in the end, the person in dead in both cases of killing and murder. But there's a complicated matter of all-things-considered value. Immoral acts carry with them ethical disvalue. As a result, cases of murder have a lower all-things-considered value than cases of killing. So the end results are actually *not* the same.
What you might mean here is that the death penalty itself is immoral. In that case, you could argue that the execution is an immoral killing and thus murder. But, Ishtaron has kindly shifted that part of the conversation to the appropriate thread.
So again, I urge those of you who disagree with the death penalty (myself included) to put that aside. Put yourself in the role of a juror in this case and just consider whether the death penalty is warranted here.
Ishtaron also makes some very good points about what isn't relevant. Whether he becomes a martyr isn't entirely relevant. Nor is the idea that there could be some sort of hostage swap in the future. There has been some discussion about the fact that sentencing him to death would just keep him in the news longer during the lengthy appeals process whereas a life sentence would basically put him in a hole somewhere never to be heard of again. Given that the families and victims want closure, this might be a relevant point, though I'm not sure.