Our Enlightened Times and the Death Penalty

I find it interesting that our collective consciousness is so different today than it was just a couple of generations ago. It is different with regards to innocent life being protected and it is different with regards to guilty life being taken. Behind it seems a confusion today regarding the great value of innocent life. In the one respect we fight for a woman's right to choose against the innocent in what was at one time the safest sanctuary in the world. And in the other, we protest the death penalty for that one who would take life whether by murder or by a bomb which scatters a little boy's limbs and amputates the legs of a beautiful girl from China. I don't imagine that there were many up until our own enlightened times that would find such acts best paid for by merely spending days in a life long time out. I wonder if it is as in parenting so as in the penal code that we have been conditioned against anything other than sending one to one's room as being a sufficient discipline and deterant?