I hope you realize you are co-opting someone's pain for your own political or ethical brownie points. A lot of people are completely happy watching their child's murderer/rapist be punished via the death penalty.
You're just trivializing an incredibly complex moral conundrum.
Given the rest of what you have written in this thread, your idea of justice comes off as being based in a punitive approach, and it shouldn't be surprising not everyone agrees with that.
How is it different when you did it?
Re: the edit, calling confessions "incontrovertible" is... unsupported. https://www.law.northwestern.edu/legalclinic/wrongfulconvict...
It is. Some people argue that it's actually a more harsh punishment than death, though. A lot of rich literature here.
> calling confessions "incontrovertible"
You're missing the forest for the trees, my point was "assuming guilt by default... blah blah." I know confessions aren't technically always reliable.
And if your default argument is that killing people is wrong then how is the state executing someone better and in favor of the death penalty? Your arguments make no sense.
> arguing against the death penalty is actually quite hard
Almost in the same sentence too
There's actually more categories as well: killing in a war as a combatant, euthanasia, abortion, and so on.
What about individuals killing as a punishment? That's a lot more common than organized recreational killings.