[Biganon]

That's not the point

Death should not be the highest form of punishment

You think it should? Then why stop there? What about death, but after weeks of gruesome torture? How many percentage points of an entire country's economy should warrant that?

[bastawhiz]

You're also missing the point. I'm not in favor of the death penalty, but I'm also not Vietnamese, and I recognize that capital punishment is their highest form of punishment. On a scale of "the most lenient punishment" to "the highest form of punishment", this is obviously at the end of that spectrum. Whether or not I believe that's a good punishment is immaterial.

What does matter is that they chose, on that scale of least to most, the most. The actions of the accused surely have and will continue to lead to death (at that scale of fraud, the downstream consequences are going to be vast and devastating to the victims). If murderers can deserve the death penalty, the abstract consequences of someone committing physical violence are remarkably less bad than the abstract consequences of the criminals in this case, so why wouldn't the same be appropriate?

Separate from the issue of whether capital punishment is moral, it's on the table whether you or I like it. At what point is the maximum punishment appropriate?