Mr Obama, on the other hand, being an extremely cautious man, only addressed capital punishment once during the camapign, when the US Supreme Court ruled in Kennedy v. Louisiana that sentencing someone to death for raping a child is unconstitutional (effectively ruling out capital punishment for crimes other than murder), a view with which he expressed disagreement at a press conference in Chicago on June 25 2008:

I think that the rape of a small child, six or eight years old, is a heinous crime and if a state makes a decision that under narrow, limited, well-defined circumstances the death penalty is at least potentially applicable, that does not violate our constitution.