What price vengeance?

In a hopeful sign that we're going to join the rest of the sane world, death penalty popularity is waning in America. Fewer juries embraced old Sparky to exact a pound of flesh in 2010 and two-thirds of Americans think that maybe other punishments are better than a sendoff to the Great Beyond.

In North Carolina, nobody took the long walk down the short hall at Central Prison this year, and no one has an appointment to do so in 2011.

The mortal experts on these matter attribute the lack of enthusiasm for capital punishment to the continuing drop in violent crime rates and the fact that it costs a lot of dough to murder someone in the name of the state. There's even a few nuts, like us, who think our imperfect courts have no business doling out final sentences that can't be corrected later.