You called it revenge killings but I prefer the term justice.
To me, “justice” is the law protecting people in society. “Justice” is stopping people from harming others. “Justice” is correcting wrongs through return of property or reinstatement at employment. “Justice” is done when inequalities are removed and people have equal access to opportunities.
If you are killing someone for a reason other than defense, that is “revenge,” or “punishment,” not “justice.”
I believe strongly in stopping people from doing harm, and I am absolutely against making people suffer to teach them or spectators a lesson.
I used to support the death penalty, mostly for pragmatic reasons; if they are harming society, get rid of them. But I have changed my stance for two reasons. One is that we are demonstrably making mistakes about who is guilty or not guilty. And the death penalty makes it impossible to correct our mistakes. And the second is that anything we want to do about protecting society for harm is adequately accomplished by incarceration and does not need death.
So, in short, the death penalty is both flawed and unnecessary.
A third reason that has become clear since my change of stance, but has gained a significant persuasiveness to me, is the message that the death penalty sends to psychopaths: that
they are not alone in thinking it’s okay to kill if you feel wronged - society collectively agrees with this.
I feel this emboldens all sorts of terrible behavior, and that we would be better off never associating Justice with punishment, revenge or retribution. It emboldens thieves, killers, domestic abusers, rapists, bullies. It allows them to say, “this behavior is not wrong, I’m doing the same thing that everyone agrees our government can do.”
We must as a society
always say that punishment, revenge and retribution are wrong.
As a side note, I do think we need drastic prison reform, but that's a different topic.
Agreed 100%
And this has everything to do with my conviction that punishment and revenge
never work.
I would be fine with giving someone who is obviously guilty of a brutal murder, the choice of life in prison or the death penalty. I would rather die than spend the rest of my life in prison, assuming I was guilty of the crime that I was prosecuted for.
I would also be fine with this. Since someone who cannot be released into society may find that incarceration is torturous, and I do not condone torture, they deserve an option. So if a prisoner wishes to choose death over lifetime incarceration, I believe that should be available to them, after rigorous and highly regulated psychiatric determination.