It boils down to moral agency … as in, does the killer have moral agency? When I get into discussions like this with other people, for fun (for myself, because it gets people to actually thinking about the issue) I use the zombie analogy…
Q1: "You know how we don’t execute the criminally insane who are killers, because they lack moral agency?"
A1: "Yeah."
Q2: "Do zombies have moral agency?"
A2: "No." (At this point you can begin to see a trace of confusion in the interviewee's eyes.)
Q3: "No? If not, then why do we kill them?"
A3: "Because they’d eat us if we didn’t?" (See how the answer starts sounding like a question, because now the interviewee is no longer ethically certain?)
I wonder what the cost to taxpayers came to for the 2 years Jeffrey Dahmer was kept in prison after his conviction. He was a people-eater too. Ironically, he and another prisoner, Jesse Anderson—who was incarcerated for life for stabbing his wife to death in a particularly gruesome manner—were both beaten to death at the same time with a 20" long steel bar, by a 3rd inmate by the name of Christopher Scarver who was already serving a life sentence without parole for a robbery/homicide. Scarver is only 53 today. He has 3 notches on his proverbial gunstock—TWO of them while he was already incarcerated. By his own confession, his murders of Dahmer and Anderson was racially motivated, as he is black, and both Dahmer and Anderson were white. How much longer will taxpayers have to cover his three hots and a cot?
There is a reason why homicides are classified in different categories, such as accidental versus premeditated. So I’m not advocating execution for someone who unintentionally kills someone else drunk driving or in an industrial accident. But mercy to homicidal maniacs is injustice to their victims, and to society. When a mad dog mauls someone to death, we don’t lock him up in the pound for life. We put him down. If we argue that a man's life has more value than a dog's, then we imply that there is a value scale that must be adhered to. Then by that scale, we have to ask if the life of a homicidal maniac is worth the same or more as the lives of either his victims, the victims' families, or the individual members of society who pay for his upkeep in prison, many times for many decades.
I am not conflicted about execution from a spiritual perspective. The Bible very clearly sanctions capital punishment. I confess however that, as a small "L" libertarian, I’m not entirely comfortable with the state having the power to execute the individual. But it’s not because I’m in opposition to the principle of putting down killers. The Bible also makes it clear that the kin of the murdered person may lawfully (from a biblical perspective) execute the murderer, without legal consequences. If the death penalty is handed down, maybe it should be the victim's family who is tasked with carrying it out. Likewise, if life without parole is handed down, maybe the convict's family should be burdened with paying for at least a significant portion of his annual upkeep in prison…since it’s arguable that the family dynamics in the convict's past is at least partially responsible for producing a murderer. (Maybe a threat of heavy financial consequences to families for doing a poor job of raising children might cause them to get their poo together and do a better job of it. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ )
Neither the threat of life in prison NOR capital punishment seems to be a deterrent to homicide. I don’t claim to have all of the answers, but I DO know that anything less than the execution of a homicidal maniac with multiple victims is an injustice to both his victims, and to society at large.
But other than that, I have no particular opinion in the matter.
