Yes the shedding of innocent blood was a sin for which the blood of the purpotrator was required. Most peoples of the earth seem to agree, hence the death penalty for 1st degree murder. Rape may also be such a crime for which blood is required. Disagreeing with theology or falling away from the church was never an offense considered to be punishable by death in the actual Church. The offsplinting churches that apostatized may have adopted sundry strange doctrines.

As for the disagreement with mixed marriages, yes Brigham Young had prejudices. I never claimed he was perfect (this stipulating that those quotes, which I have seen before on wikepedia, weren't taken from "salamander" sources like the Adam-God idea). The Bible seems to show that Peter was a racist for not believing the gentiles should be taught the gospel until having the dream he dreamt in Acts Chapter 10. The death to which Young referred was Spiritual Death, which is a separation of Man from the Divine, in this case with the Priesthood. This is evidenced by the fact that you will not find instances in Mormon History where people were slain for participating in a mixed marriage.

Young lived in the1800s, when almost everybody was racist by today's standards. People will pull up quotes from Abraham Lincoln and Friedrick Douglas (Go figure), claiming that they are white supremacists.

But people should be judged by their actions much more so than by their words, regardless of what intellectual academia demands. Joseph Smith sold a family horse to help a freed slave by his son. Brigham Young, in that same quote you quoted, also demanded that Americans repent for their poor treatment and even segregation of Blacks from Society. Blacks were never forbidden church membership nor the rights of citizenship with Mormons any more than what prohibitions the Federal Government had already set upon them (Brigham Young didn't create the three-fifths of a man doctrine). They were merely forbidden the priesthood (which is hardly a civil right, not necessary for salvation, and has been exclusionary ever since the Levites were the only tribe permitted to belong to it.), and unfortunately, Brigham Young had a problem with interracial marriage, which was an opinion held by virtually everyone else at the time, and was discarded by mormons long befor e it was at Bob Jones University.

If you think that religion in general is what caused racism, than look no further to the diagrams in your Biology Text Book that show the fish and human embryos appearing to be the same. The artist was a eugenic biologist, and Darwinist, by the name of Ernst Haeckel, who refered to black people as "wooley-haired negroes...psychologically nearer to the mammals (apes and dogs) than to civilized Europeans...[and therefore] we must....assign a totally different value to their lives." You'd never here Young say anything like that.

"By their fruits, ye shall know them." not merely by lipservicewhile you and I can discuss the historical racism of Mormon Prophets, the LDS Church spends millions upon millions to alleviate real human suffering in Africa.