Interesting Post on Prisoners' Rights

The Debate Link discusses voting rights for prisoners. I recently had a similar discussion about Justice in the context of whether, even given Bush's war crimes, he should, or in fact must, be given the death penalty if convicted.

The main justification for the death penalty in this case is that no one person has committed crimes the level of his in the history of the USA, and since we are willing to put some people to death, how can we justify not doing so to a war criminal? Though the death penalty is an extreme and irreversible punishment, and exercising mercy in a capital case would not necessarily undermine our entire system of justice, especially if length of time in jail is the standard metric, as David suggests.