I'm not quite sure what I think about the death penalty. But it is not obvious to me that it is a worse punishment than life in prison. In fact I think that personally, given the choice I would choose death.
> In fact I think that personally, given the choice I would choose death.
I, too, am not sure that I'd prefer life in prison over death, but in practice it takes decades to execute a convicted prisoner in the US, and since you're considered a particularly dangerous prisoner (since you have nothing to lose) you're held in particularly isolated and unpleasant conditions during those decades. If I thought I was going to get the death penalty I might prefer to just blow my brains out quickly and easily before they have a chance to slap the handcuffs on.
I can't be arsed to fact-check it, but I'm pretty sure I've read that death row inmates are more likely to die of natural causes while awaiting execution than they are to actually be executed - that's how long the legal process waits.
I can't, and I also find it hard to justify life sentences for all but the most horrific of crimes (and for those who pose too much of a danger to be allowed back into society.)
Norway doesn't even have a statutory penalty of "life without parole" except for military offences. The maximum prison sentence it's possible to receive in 30 years - although it's still possibly in practice to be imprisoned for longer, because your release after 30 years is conditional and the sentence may be extended. Even Anders Breivik, the terrorist who killed 77 people in 2011, didn't get a "life sentence" as that term would be understand in the US.
If you don't believe that people have a right to life, I suppose that being murdered by the state is just another notch on the spectrum of "acceptable punishment".
It's an odd contradiction to me that people who support the death penalty are mostly not ok with the state using, for example, punitive rape as a punishment, but killing is somehow okay, if the crime is severe enough.
How are rape and the death sentence related? You could just as well say that it's weird how people can support taking someones's freedom and locking them away, but are not okay with raping them.
Because we as a society have generally reached a consensus that premediated killing of human beings is one of the worst crimes possible.
The fact that it is regarded by some as an acceptable punitive measure carried out by the state, whereas other, lesser crimes against human beings are deemed "off limits" for such purposes, seems to me to expose an inherent contradiction. To avoid the contradiction, either both should be acceptable, or neither.
Presently there seems to be a slight majority consensus on Earth that the correct answer is "neither", with the overall trend suggesting that the rest of the planet will get there in another couple hundred years.
There can be some morally justifiable scenarios. For example, someone who is a political or religious leader who has used that position to kill people. If they still have followers, their very existence can continue to cause issues. Think Saddam, Hitler, or Bin Laden.