Capital punishment is just barbaric. It's the state committing planned murder.
Philly just paid nearly $10 million to some guy they'd wrongfully imprisoned for nearly 30 years.
Ah, no, that's not how this works.
https://www.amnestyusa.org/issues/death-penalty/death-penalt...
Surely killing someone can be way cheaper than sustaining them for life.
Being the key word here: you do not really know and so you would not want to get shot as you might be out in 5.
Inmates will pretend to or legitimately damage the cell or themselves to get guard attention and then assault the guards.
Study these issues further and you will find it's not simply a matter of putting someone in a single cell by themselves and now that's it, they can never harm anyone again.
There are elaborate criminal schemes that occur inside of correctional institutions.
Eventually, society will have exhausted every recourse in attempting to accommodate this person, and I say not to be sarcastic, but to present you something to think about, would you welcome a known serial killer into your home since you are so against killing them and there's no place left to put them? How much do you expect others to suffer and sacrifice for one criminal and your own perceived social justice?
https://www.amnestyusa.org/issues/death-penalty/death-penalt...
Does the existence of an organized state really feel like it changes the ethics of the situation? I don't think so. Does the existence of prisons change the ethics? I don't think so either. Further I'd argue that the state going against the will of the people is unethical and an abuse of power. Lastly, murder as the ultimate sin seems like a pretty western religious oriented perspective. I don't think it holds as much weight as it used to.
The only compelling reason in my opinion that capital punishment is unethical is that our criminal justice system is so shit.
I'm saying this is probably the conclusion that rational humans would come to if an outsider arrived, killed people, and left. They should be killed, because, even ignoring themes of justice, he's a huge outlier threat. The entire pretext that killing him is morally outrageous is not a given at all. On some level if you're gonna play ball at the extreme ends of crime, then you should be willing to accept that you're gonna fucking die if society manages to stop you.
It doesn't strike me as morally problematic to say "if you rape and murder child then we'll kill you", and then kill someone who rapes and murders a child.
The problem, again, with both our justice system and mob justice that makes these not good is that they're easily manipulated, inaccurate, and emotionally swayed. And historically super racist if you care to bring that into the discussion.
To hold that no culture is barbaric can be seen as a very enlightened position, but it is of course also a position that does not provide any moral guidance at all with respect to established customs, such as for example Kaluli manhood rituals where the young boys must ingest the sperm of their elders by the Anus (a practice much reviled by the nearby Etoro who instead prescribe oral ingestion).
The fact that a majority might decide to not grant fundamental rights to a minority doesn't make their killings any less barbaric.
(I don't mean to downplay the fact that there are difficult questions for working out how much money a government should invest to add one quality-adjusted life-year to their citizens, or how to calculate QALYs in the first place, but governments do manage to do that and these questions are not the level that political controversies generally focus on. Also, I'm completely ignoring the issue of national defence here, as people can disagree on military posture based on other considerations).