If you're going to throw someone in prison for the rest of their life, be honest about it and admit you are taking their life.
Abolishing capital punishment to "fix" criminal justice is just closing your eyes and pretending to not see the issue.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_imprisonment#Reform_or_ab...
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/world/europe/10iht-britain...
that's showing a weakness to evil, and weakness will always be eventually used against the best intentions of original authors (in his case, I wouldn't mind firing squad right after trial, in same way he killed those kids). there is 0% doubt about his full guilt, and almost 100% chance he will never add any positive value to mankind, ever.
But this is also problematic as the prisoner is locked up for an undetermined amount of time, which is suffering in and of itself. But I don't think it's worse than life without parole, which seems like absolute torture to me.
BTW, after 2015 the maximum sentence in Norway is 30 years.
Will Breivik get out in 21 years? It's possible that he'll convince the necessary people that he's been appropriately punished and understands why his actions were wrong, but most people believe it's unlikely. --The terms of his conviction allow him to be held longer if the State determines it is necessary.
The US needs to start looking at prisons more like Norway does - the deprivation of freedom is punishment for a crime, but we should have a duty to those who are imprisoned to help prepare them for when they are released - at that point their punishment is supposed to be over, and their crimes shouldn't continue to follow them and prevent them from being able to live like any other person.
Abolishing capital punishment allows us to reverse the decision later when new evidence comes to light exonerating the convict. You can't free a dead person.
There are other justifications as well in terms of financial cost although the facts are more cloudy there, I've seen good quality analyses presenting cases in favour of both arguments around the cost of the death penalty vs lifetime incarceration.
If those people hadn't been on death row, they'd still be rotting in prison.
If you give people the option of throwing someone in prison and forgetting about them, or forcing them to actually decide on their guilt, they will always choose the former.
If I was wrongly convicted, I would much, much, much rather be on death row than in for life-without-parole.
Fix the problems with wrongful conviction, lack of appeals, etc etc, and we can come back and abolish capital punishment.
But right now, it's naiive to advocate for abolishing capital punishment, because in the absence of other reforms, it simply makes the current system worse.
Halt capital punishment to prevent further, irreversible, errors. AND work on other reforms (better trial lawyers, more equitable appeals process, etc.). Then you can bring back capital punishment once we have a greater degree of confidence in the system.
Why do you think the rest of the first world has outlawed capital punishment?
Additionally, people can and do kill themselves in prison: there is a way out of serving a full-life sentence that doesn't involve judicial killing.