[shkkmo]

The problems with the death penalty is the trade off between cost and accuracy in applying the death penalty.

Currently, the death penalty costs more than life in prison due to legal costs. We still have a significant non-zero number of innocent people who are executed.

If you want to make the death penalty cost effective, you will have to lower the appeal costs and this means more innocent people will be executed.

So the question really becomes: "how many innocent people are we willing to murder to reduce our costs?

Many people accept the number of innocent people we murder as justified to save other innocents via disincentive. It seems much harder to justify killing purely on the basis of cost reduction.

You are correct that we don't seem nearly as bothered by all of the innocent people who are serving life sentences rather than death penalties and don't have the same appeal rights as those on death row.