Well I reject your framing of it being impossible. If it is cheaper to house and feed a man for sixty years than it is to kill him, that is a policy decision, not a law of the universe. Other respectable countries manage to achieve this.
I think we are at a fundamental disagreement though; I think it should be expensive and difficult to execute someone. I think the slow appeals process is a good thing. It should hard for the government to kill people who aren’t a direct threat.
I don’t know your politics but it doesn’t matter the specifics. Imagine whichever politician that you think is most stupid and tyrannical. Do you really want to give them the ability to rapidly kill people they don’t like without at least some bureaucratic checks in place?
* In the sense that society needs to feel that the state executes justice and that such people are not being kept alive on their own dime. That breeds contempt for the system and for the state.
The jury system of the US is a good system but it’s certainly not immune to mob mentality. It’s certainly not immune to appeals to emotion. It’s certainly not immune to any number of the things that make humans human. This is partly why we have an appeals process. If we are going to put someone to death, I think it’s better for them to be given every single avenue possible to prove their innocence so that we aren’t murdering someone innocent.
People who are a risk to normal society do need to be separated, and for that I am willing to not be 100% sure (though with plenty of chances for appeals). If we lock up someone for a crime they didn’t commit, we at least have the option to release them and potentially pay out some kind of financial settlement as a means of punishing the state for their mistakes. If you kill someone, there’s not really much of an opportunity to even try and make it right.
At the end of the day, the death penalty's only possible justification is retribution. It does not deter crime and incapacitation of the criminal can already be achieved by locking them up. Your logic presupposes that "an eye for an eye" is a legitimate philosophy for a modern State to hold, which is reprehensible.
Can you elaborate on this? How does cultural homogeneity relate to the State being able to ditch retributive principles?
> When heinous criminals get to live out their days, people feel that justice is not being done, breeding vigilantes and unrest. Especially when they get released early, but even if they are never released.
That just seems like a problem for education, no? If people are told by their teachers and other figures of authority that retribution isn't good, that should be enough. Again that's how the Nordics do it and it seems to be working out for them.
There are a billion potential reasons for this, but it doesn’t appear to be that people have started dawning costumes and LARPing as the Punisher in large numbers.
> society needs to feel that the state executes justice
> People largely feel a greater trust in the state and a greater sense of justice and peace of mind when heinous criminals are killed
> people feel that justice is not being done
(and again)
> people feel that justice is not being done
They’re not going to give anybody a rational argument here because
> I guess you could call it vibes sure
It’s like asking somebody to justify why they’re really into ABDL stuff. The important part is that they just are, and won’t be talked out of it.
In brief, it doesn't matter what "is best" in some utilitarian framework if the democracy is not attuned to that framework. It doesn't matter if the death penalty actually increases crime. What matters is that the government should be doing what the people want it to be doing. If the people really want to kill criminals, any system that prevents that is non-democratic.