I must disagree - the death penalty for civilians is not acceptable.
The important thing for Brazil (this is my personal opinion as someone from a developed nation, so by all means ignore me!) is to build the economy so that crime doesn't pay anymore. The new economies (BRIC) are doing a great job of this, and you need to stick at it!
You should also know that here in the UK "most of the population" want the death penalty back (I don't know if this is true anymore, but it certainly was until relatively recently) - but the political establishment understand that this is not a vote winner. Much like EU membership, most people who want hanging, or to leave the EU, won't vote against you if you disagree with them on that - they will choose who to vote for on something else. Woe betide any pro-death penalty politician though - as many people would vote against them for this reason (maybe not so much with the EU,) thus, politicians in the 80s and 90s were by and large anti-death-penalty, even though a referendum on it would have brought it back.
This, by the way, is not "undemocratic" or anything - it's about what issues are important to people, as well as their direct opinion (this is why many polls about the EU in the UK are misleading - people don't like it, but it's not very important to them.) I suspect that even in Brazil people would (or will eventually) place economic policy ahead of death penalty stance when choosing who to vote for - and so it won't change.
'in the UK "most of the population" want the death penalty back'
I suspect that is usually the case in the immediate aftermath of some horrible murder. I wonder what percentage of people would be in favour of capital punishment immediately after being reminded of the Guildford Four.
Here the few pro-death penalty politicians are extreme far right... So noone want to vote for them (specially because here most of politics are around the left... we have no really power right-wing party, the mainstream party that most people consider "right" is the socialist party (that obviously is still left, even if center-left).
But it is obvious that the population DO put killing criminals in high regard, otherwise they would not kill them quite frequently (and I must confess, if I could, I would kill a bunch of guys too, my parents house got robbed 8 times already, and because of some broken laws these people cannot be arrested, and for other reasons the police even refuse to come visit a crime scene, they just ignore it... thankfully, I don't need to kill all of them, one of them already got a sword on his gut after a failed robbery, and others are going toward the same path, considering they also even tried to rob house of cops, even a SWAT cop once...)
And it is not just matter of... economics. Here it is cultural, the amount of rich people that are criminals here is very high too, Brazil has the famous Gerson Law in effect ("Gerson Law" is how people nicknamed here the theory that most people here will do ANYTHING to achieve personal advantage...)
I remember when a pool was made here, that asked two questions: "Are most politicians corrupt?" and "If you were elected, would you be a corrupt politicians?"
The reply to the first was around 90%, no surprise here...
that last poll - that makes me very sad. From this, and the news recently, it seems like Brazilian politics needs a fresh start - either by a genuinely impressive electoral challenge from a credibly honest party, or by some extra-electoral means (which are always of questionable morality, even if they do "work".)
The important thing for Brazil (this is my personal opinion as someone from a developed nation, so by all means ignore me!) is to build the economy so that crime doesn't pay anymore. The new economies (BRIC) are doing a great job of this, and you need to stick at it!
You should also know that here in the UK "most of the population" want the death penalty back (I don't know if this is true anymore, but it certainly was until relatively recently) - but the political establishment understand that this is not a vote winner. Much like EU membership, most people who want hanging, or to leave the EU, won't vote against you if you disagree with them on that - they will choose who to vote for on something else. Woe betide any pro-death penalty politician though - as many people would vote against them for this reason (maybe not so much with the EU,) thus, politicians in the 80s and 90s were by and large anti-death-penalty, even though a referendum on it would have brought it back.
This, by the way, is not "undemocratic" or anything - it's about what issues are important to people, as well as their direct opinion (this is why many polls about the EU in the UK are misleading - people don't like it, but it's not very important to them.) I suspect that even in Brazil people would (or will eventually) place economic policy ahead of death penalty stance when choosing who to vote for - and so it won't change.