Why does anyone deserve to be murdered by the state or by anyone else no matter what they themselves have done? What does that achieve other than satisfying a bloodlust?
Protecting people from further harm. Punishment instead of rehabilitation. It's fine if you wouldn't, but understand plenty of people feel differently. Surely you're onboard with some punishment or rehabilitation. There are those who would go further.
As a matter of practice, I oppose the death penalty. But I acknowledge there are people that deserve to die.
What about the other people in the prisons? Is solitary sufficient for you? What about the psychological harm that can do? Does a life sentence of torture work? What amount of resources should we direct to keeping a dangerous person locked up alive and not psychologically tortured? Are there other government functions you'd be fine losing at the cost of housing them? In the US we can manage that, but other countries maybe not.
Sorry... are you claiming the death penalty is more humane than not killing a person? Because, considering the number of appeals, I would suggest that shows that the actual people on death row would prefer the psychological torture.
No. I'm saying unintended effects and the impact to the rest of society needs to be considered. Solitary confinement has been equated with torture. Would you be fine effectively torturing people you want kept alive? If the cost of incarceration left the rest of the society in danger due to lack of resources, would you shoulder that burden?
I never said anything about solitary confinement. You brought that up. Somehow we've been doing fine with multiple domestic terrorists and serial killers being in supermax prisons without keeping them in solitary.
What part of the world could they not keep people in similar conditions as a supermax? If it's a matter of money and that's the only reason they don't have them, that seems like an argument in favor of funding them, not in favor of the death penalty. I can't think of another reason.
Incidentally, the fact that the U.S. is the only Western country with the death penalty, sharing that honor mostly with theocracies and dictatorships, should tell you something about the ethics of it.
The hypothetical doesn't need to exist in reality. It's part of the thought process. It's not meant to be an argument for a realistic applicant of the death penalty. Again... I oppose the death penalty.
Now imagine a society (this can be fictitious) without the resources to house criminals indefinitely. How do you manage using resources, to the detriment of the innocent, to house criminals with a life sentence?
We don't need to imagine it. It's on that map I posted. All those non-dictatorships that don't have the death penalty are able to manage it. i.e. the entirety of Europe save Belarus, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and many other countries.