Depends on what you mean by "forgive" and "change".

To forgive can mean the release of resentment and hurt feelings without relinquishing the need for justice or reparation, and without minimizing the event or the situation. 

It can also mean the total relinquishment of reparation and justice.  The debt is forgiven - you no longer owe a dime.  Jesus forgives you - you are now as clean as snow.  I think most people think this way when they think of forgiveness. 

It seems to me this guy would like to be forgiven in both senses.  To atone and attempt to provide some justice for his victims and to wipe out the death sentence.  I have no opinion on whether he should or should not be forgiven in any sense as I don't know him, his victims, their families, and so on.  He may have "changed" and it may be a con.  Can't tell from this distance.

I do think people can change.  And change in significant ways.  But I am skeptical of the massive changes necessary to go from killing in cold blood to Johnny SweetnessAndLight.  What does his psychiatrist say?

The death penalty is a giant waste. It's ridiculous, and people who support it should be charged as accessories to murder 1.

I have often wondered exactly where I do stand on the death penalty. For instance, if someone broke in my house, raped and murdered my girlfriend, I would want them dead.

But, if I had a family member that shot someone in cold blood or committed a horrendous crime, and let's say it is a family member that I have always been really close to, would I be able to say that they deserve to die ? I guess there would be no true way for me to answer that unless faced with it.

Me personally, I don't think that I could forgive someone for murdering someone close to me, unless it was an accident, like a car wreck or something unintentional, I believe I could eventually forgive that once I got through the whole grieving process thing.

The arguments for/against the death penalty should not have anything to do with personal forgiveness or not, but should only be about "Does the death penalty do more good than harm to society as a whole?" By any objective standards, it has been shown to be ineffective at preventing crime (compared to life imprisonment), while drastically increasing the risk of killing innocent, wrongly convicted people.

Aside from that, the question of personal forgiveness remains an interesting one.

Personally, I think forgiveness can be a very helpful way of improving one's mental health, if constant brooding over some issue is causing mental health problems like depression, uncontrolled anger/rage problems, abuse, self-abuse, and potential suicide, among others.

Also, I didn't read the article or whatever it was, but the survivor seemed to be advocating for the murderer to take on some positive role in society. I can get behind that kind of forgiveness, especially if the 'alternative' is death. Just because someone committed a horrible crime doesn't mean that they are incapable of voluntarily providing some beneficial service to society. In fact, that's the paradigm of rehabilitation that we should be pushing for in criminal enforcement. Wherever I've seen rehabilitation provided, the overall social benefit (including reduced overall crime from reduced recidivism) has been very large.

The one danger I see in forgiveness, though, is when people 'forgive' horrible crimes as a way of 'forgiving and forgetting', which amounts to simply sweeping bad shit under the rug where it festers and grows. This can happen in the criminal justice system, but it also happens in personal abusive relationships where the victim of abuse too quickly 'forgives and forgets' the abuser's transgressions, and stays in the relationship. That kind of forgiveness ... ahem... cannot be forgiven... or something.

That's a fallacy. Reduce the penalty for murder to a fine, and get back to me on how the numbers of murders don't spike.

That's a fallacy (two actually, Straw Man and False Dichotomy.) I said "compared to life imprisonment." What part of "compared to life imprisonment" do you not understand?

You would expect that to be true, but the surprising fact is that it's not true, especially in the case of the death penalty.

You will, for example, have a very difficult time finding any serious research supporting the effectiveness of the death penalty in prevention of crime. In most cases, you'll actually find the opposite correlation, that states that use the death penalty have higher incidents of capital offenses, for example.

But I'll leave you to it. It's actually a detour from the topic of the OP (which is the question of forgiveness and its justifiability). If you want to continue on this vein, start another thread; these debates tend to be derailments.

Yes, because immediate threats of death are exactly the same as potential long-term consequences of possibly getting caught committing a crime. Obviously. Only not actually. Again, start another thread if you want to continue this.

You're not addressing the argument: It is a question of whether the benefit outweighs the risks. Not a question of if there are absolutely no risks. Due to your mangling of my sentences, you're losing sight of the context. Here's what I said:

If you feel the need to reply to this, please do start another thread.