Angela Corey is the State Attorney of the Fourth Judicial Circuit of Florida. A veteran prosecutor, during her 25-year tenure Corey has prosecuted hundreds of cases including more than 50 homicides. Once little-known outside Jacksonville, Corey is now familiar to millions. She is the prosecutor who charged Zimmerman with second-degree murder, punishable with life imprisonment. He is now on bail awaiting trial. 

Corey, an active Republican and devout Christian, is a steadfast supporter of the death penalty: "I had a young black woman tell me she was totally against the death penalty unless somebody killed someone in her family. Luckily justice is blind and we treat everyone's loved ones the same."

Alice Vachss is a prosecutor who, as former chief of the Special Victims Bureau in Queens, NYPD, has helped convict scores of rapists, child abusers and murderers. She is against the death penalty. "Prosecuting stomach-turning crimes, I can certainly name people whose death improves the species. No one can read of the rapes and murders at 10 Rillington Place, for example, and doubt that John Christie deserved to die," says Vachss. "But the death penalty means that the state buries its mistakes. Has England forgotten that Timothy Evans was hanged for Christie's crimes?"

The death penalty is an example of calculated, cold-blooded, premeditated murder. As a feminist who has spent my entire adult life campaigning to eradicate violent crimes towards women and children I have seen the devastating effects of child abuse, rape and sexually motivated murder, and yet I do not want to kill those men who carry out such hideous crimes, for to do that would be too easy a solution. I refuse to believe that any man or woman is born inherently good or evil, and believe that long-term change and individual rehabilitation is possible. 

I took seriously the views of those warm and hospitable people I met in Starke, and can understand why, for many, the only just penalty for committing an act of cold-blooded murder is to forfeit the right to life. But it does not deter crime, is expensive to implement, and contravenes every human rights convention. The death penalty degrades America and calls into question its role as leader of the free world.