It's not hard. It's in fact very easy to empathize with victims and difficult to empathize with criminals. I just find it very much worthwhile to be empathetic towards all humans, even the ones that do terrible things because doing so allows us to understand humanity better and in turn may help prevent people from doing terrible things in the future.
> "One is too many" is not enough to justify a complete abolition of the death penalty.
Actually, it does in fact, do just that. Why do you think it doesn't? You're basically saying the value of a person who deserves to die's death (or many of their deaths) is more valuable than an innocent person's life. To me it's quite clear that's not the case.
Because it's not a zero-sum game. You can feel bad for both.
It's extremely expensive to use the death penalty. It must be because it's not acceptable to murder too many innocent people, which I think you would agree even if we might debate the threshold. But even at the current astronomical level of expense many people are falsely convicted and on track for execution before they're exonerated, so it seems unlikely that we could make it significantly more economical. (and many would argue that the high failure rate is because we're already compromising on ethics just to make it economical at all)
As far as empathizing with the victims, sure: Some victims feel bloodlust. This can be an understandable response, though seldom a healthy one. But the same can be true for murderers: some were driven by an understandable bloodlust, at times distinguished only by the quality of the judgement justifying it or the surrounding social standards. It's not an appropriate use for the state to indulge anyone's bloodlust, particularly at considerable expense. The potential that the death penalty is sometimes motivated by survivors's bloodlust is a reason to eschew it, not to embrace it.
People feel anguish due to all manner of causes. That is an unfortunate, but it's also an fact of life. Many causes of anguish have no possible remedy. The anguish felt by the surviving victims of a murder's crime is one such example. It can never be righted by any external process, because no one can undo the murder. It's folly to think otherwise. The resources we current spend on the death penalty could be better employed to prevent murders in the first place and/or to help victims cope in more productive ways.
How is a tit-for-tat killing "empathizing with the victims" in any way?
I don't have faith in the state’s ability to remove the actual perpetrator from the streets. They pick someone, and defend that choice.
Yes it is.