What is unclear about "premeditated"? The idea here is that there is no threat. The person is in prison. The person is therefore also defenseless. In order to execute them, you must plan it out, and ensure that they are entirely defenseless when you finally murder them. The point is not to make it a gladiatorial contest, but to do away with premeditated murder of a defenseless person. You have a choice between murder and removing them from society in a humane way. Choosing murder is just the morally cheap and easy way out.
>> that suits heretics, Indians, slaves, adulterers, disobedient
>wives, drug dealers, thiefs, lazy workers, murderers, and whoever
>else shall not be deemed "deserving" of life.>
>
>There you go again! Equating heinous crimes with minor ones, or
>with none at all. How barbaric.
So, is Rudolph Guiliani deserving of the death penalty because through his social policies has been the cause of people dying? What about all the others those who, in Francis Jennings' phrase, in their gold-laced waistcoats order blood to be spilled by dirty-handed underlings? Don't Carter, Clinton, North, Reagan, Lott, Gingrich, Moynihan, Dodd, etc., deserve the axe too? Where are you prepared to draw the line?
I'll finish by beating you about the head and neck with St. Augustine:
This is just as perverse as to imagine that our enemies can do us
more harm than we do to ourselves by hating them, or that by
persecuting another man we can damage him more fatally than we
damage our own hearts in the process. O God, alone in majesty,
high in the silence of heaven, unseen by man! we can see how your
unremitting justice punishes unlawful ambition with blindness,
for a man who longs for fame as a fine speaker will stand up
before a human judge, surrounded by a human audience, and lash
his opponent with malicious invective, taking the greatest care
not to say "'uman" instead of "human" by a slip of the tongue,
and yet the thought that the frenzy in his own mind may condemn a
human being to death disturbs him not at all.
---Saint Augustine, *Confessions*
Bill