There are many horrible people in the world. There are many more GOOD people, and people who have merely made mistakes.
Some horrible people commit heinous crimes that the majority of society feels are unforgivable.
Since these heinous crimes are unforgivable there are members of society who feel the criminals committing the crime must be not only removed from society but killed - via governmental intervention called 'execution'.
Generally speaking I would agree with this stance.
BUT, there is a huge problem.
The problem is that the person successfully convicted of a crime by our 'achievement' motivated legal system is not necessarily the person who committed the heinous crime, and that the government gets to define which crime are unforgivably heinous. You know the same government who has sterilize people based on race, committed experiments on people without their consent, has been caught in a number of politically motivated lies, and seems to consist more of insiders than truly democratically chosen representatives based on the representatives merits beyond campaign financing.
If you are a republican would you want Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno to choose which crimes merit the death penalty, if you are a democrat would you want Strom Thurgood and Trump deciding the same?
The power of life and death is an extreme power. An absolute power that when implemented does not allow any true compensation and limited recourse.
If a thousand guilty criminals must go free so that we as a society do not execute a single innocent person, I would prefer that.
On the flip side, I am all for the defense of life and limb of oneself or others with lethal measures wherever reasonably necessary. Thus I am for gun rights, concealed and open carry, etc.
But reasonable use of lethal force by a trained citizen, soldier, or law enforcement officer at the scene and time of a crime is a wholly different issue than an execution carried out by the government. When the government commits an execution there is no individual responsibility if the executed is later found to be innocent of the heinous crime, where as a person at the scene of a crime must in some way be involved in the crime, and the person protecting themselves or others is responsible for their use of force.
If we must remove heinous criminals from our society, and I agree we probably should, then we should simply lock them in a cell without luxuries or the possibility of any future release (unless they are found innocent in the future). The cost for this is actually less than the cost of our current method of executions over the life of the criminal, and far less prone to irreversible abuse.
