Support for the death penalty is a form of "virtue signaling" to indicate that someone cares for law and order and justice for victims. The reality is that a large subset of the voting population believes it is safer to kill a few innocent individuals rather than accidentally let a guilty person go free.
> The reality is that a large subset of the voting population believes it is safer to kill a few innocent individuals rather than accidentally let a guilty person go free.
This is a strange sentence to read, as if the one has anything to do with the other. Abolishing the death penalty won't cause guilty people to go free.
State-sanctioned homicide does not seem like justice to me, especially when there are false positives. And taking things into your own hands will just land you in that same prison cell, which your loved ones probably would not appreciate.