I'm in favor of the death penalty for murderers and I think it should be extended to rapists and child molesters (since the death penalty was re-instituted in 1976, the Supreme Court made sure that rapists and molesters are ineligible for death penalty convictions unless the crime is directly tied to a murder) but I am firmly against life sentencing, especially life without parole.
The whole "Life without parole" trend is part of why our prisons are so overcrowded and dysfunctional, along with the spike in mass incarcerations following the War on Drugs and the Clinton-era War on Crime.
Personally, if I were in charge, I'd abolish life sentencing in all fifty states and automatically commute all life sentences or make it to where the offender has to be re-sentenced depending on the crime. There's a lot of lifers who would've got the death penalty in states that hadn't abolished the practice or were able to get a competent enough lawyer or plea deal to get life without parole instead of execution.
Unfortunately, when the Supreme Court overturned life sentencing for juvenile offenders, they left a loophole that has allowed a lot of states to simply uphold the original life sentence when re-sentenced since the prisoners in question are no longer juveniles and so the courts will just automatically reissue the original sentence.
The way I would have it be done, lifers have to be resentenced. All lifers who were convicted before the age of 21 get their sentence fully commuted and are released, while other lifers get a new sentencing to determine if they will get a reduced sentence, a fully commuted/overturned sentence, or the death penalty.
All executions will be done by firing squad. Despite being the most humane way of execution, it's heavily stigmatized and demonized in America, even in pro-death penalty states. Hanging was the most common form of execution in the United States since Jamestown and later was supplanted by the electric chair and lethal injection, but firing squad has always been a rarity in American executions, outside of military executions and a few isolated cases in Utah.
Part of it is the whole issue of deniability and culpability of the executioners and I'd wager part of it has to do with the firing squad being seen as the method of executing political prisoners and dissidents, particularly in communist regimes (Nicholas II was wrongfully executed by a Bolshevik firing squad along with his wife and children) and I'd say that a lot of "Red Scare" paranoia had to do with many states that had the death penalty explicitly outlawing firing squads in favor of the electric chair and lethal injection, since the original wave of anticommunist sentiment in the 1920's also roughly coincided with the decline of hanging and the rise of the electric chair as a replacement (although Ol' Sparky had been used since the 1890's, hangings were more common until the 1920's and 1930's in many places)
Basically, I believe we need to abolish life sentencing altogether and make the death penalty an option for certain specific crimes in all fifty states.
