On the Price of Life (In Prison)

One of the arguments made by some anti-death penalty advocates is that life in prison is an infinitely more punitive sentence than death. It forces a killer to live with his crime every day for years upon years, coupled with the knowledge that he will never again see the light of day. Along those lines, a group of lifers in Italy - 310 of them - are begging for the government to bring back the death penalty and execute them:

The letter they sent to President Napolitano came from a convicted mobster, Carmelo Musumeci, a 52-year-old who has been in prison for 17 years.

It was co-signed by 310 of his fellow lifers.

Musumeci said he was tired of dying a little bit every day.

We want to die just once, he said, and "we are asking for our life sentence to be changed to a death sentence".

It was a candid letter written by a man who, from within his cell, has tried hard to change his life.

He has passed his high school exams and now has a degree in law. But his sentence, he says, has transformed the light into shadows.

He told the president his future was the same as his past, killing the present and removing every hope.

An anecdote isn't evidence, of course. But it's pretty strong support for the idea that the "life is worse than death" argument isn't just some sort of philosophical BS.