I would prefer not to give my vote to any politician who supports the death penalty, which limits my choices in the presidential field of 2008 to Barack Obama (though he's not really a fervent opponent; his position on state executions strikes me as ambiguous), Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich. Mitt Romney wanted to reinstate the death penalty in Massachusetts while the commonwealth's governor, but he wanted the state to pick and chose only certain types of killers for the ultimate punishment. Hillary Clinton, like her husband, supports the death penalty so she can't be accused by the right of being too soft on crime. (Bill Clinton in 1992 signed the death warrant for a brain-damaged inmate on Arkansas's death row.) It's the height of intellectual dishonesty for the Clintons to support the death penalty, being liberals posing as neo-cons and being students of the law and knowing, as I'm certain they do, that the application of capital punishment in the United States is, to use author Scott Turow's phrase from Thursday's column, "wildly inconsistent." And wildly unfair.

Here's a great resource that explains where the GOP and Dem prez candidates stand on the issue.