Death penalty? No idea. While I agree that there are some people for whom there is no hope of rehabilitation, and that for those people it seems a waste of money that could be going to social programs, road repair, paying government employees, etc., in order to keep them in prison for life; I'm often concerned that the wrong people are being executed. How do we know that this person is incapable of rehabilitation, just because a jury of their peers decided they were guilty of a specific crime which was considered heinous enough for the prosecutor to seek the death penalty?
Castration for rapists, cutting off the hands of thieves? No. Is castration going to stop people from committing additional rapes? Maybe. I'm not sure what the stats are on convicted rapists who've been chemically castrated and whether or not they've re-offended. Is cutting the hands off of thieves going to stop people from stealing again? Well... it'll certainly make it much more difficult, but now I'm going to have to pay for a permanent caretaker for this douchenozzle because we cut his damn hands off for stealing something.
Would I want to hit someone with a wrench until they stopped moving if they assaulted someone I love? I'd like to think that I wouldn't even want to do that, but whether I wanted to or not, I wouldn't do it. I'm not the justice system.
Insanity defense? Well, honestly, as with all of these questions, it depends on the specifics of the case.
What I'd really like to see punished more severely? DUI. Especially DUIs that result in injuries to third parties and/or deaths. The issue is, you can't really stop someone from driving drunk if they don't want to stop doing it. You can take away their license and insurance, making them liable for a lot more money if they get in an accident or get caught, but these people are driving drunk, so it's not like they have good reasoning skills in the first place or that the thought of having to pay an outlandish amount of money is going to enter in to their planning for the evening. You can put an interlock device on their car, but that doesn't prevent them from driving someone else's car or from getting someone else to blow into the device. Washington state is starting a new program where interlock devices will have cameras that will snap a photo of the person who actually blows into the device, but it's not like we're going to be able to assign enough cops to go through every photo taken by these devices, in real time, so they can go catch the moron before they hit another car or hit a bicyclist while drunkenly driving a metro bus (happened this week, in Seattle).
