Ahh, only on arfcom - the death penalty for assault and robbery.
If you take emotion out of it, the death penalty is ridiculous. Of course, she won't get what she should because our justice system is pussy. I'd give her somewhere between 3 and 10 years in prison, depending on priors.
I will say I don't know how one manages not to be prejudiced nowadays. Probably anyone who claims they aren't is a liar, often to themselves.
Racism - the intellectual belief that skin pigmentation makes one person superior or inferior to another, is risible.
Prejudice, however, is so ingrained in the human brain that it's impossible to avoid and it's not really an intellectual construct. Day after day you see certain types of crime committed by certain types of people, and you will associate these people with the crime. It's literally how the brain works, our brains are pattern matching systems.