@CaptainHarley and @BBSDTfamily Society certainly does have a right to protect itself but the economics, the cost shouldn’t factor into whether or not the State consciously and deliberately ends a human life, no matter whose life, in my opinion. There are some things that are not a matter of the economics or the cost of something. If you support the death penalty for other reasons, fine. So that society can protect itself, as punishment, as a matter of justice, whatever, but I don’t think it should ever be about the money, about the economics of it, IMHO.
And regarding the supposedly “endless appeals.” God forbid we should take the death penalty more seriously than we take other forms of punishment and put quite a bit more effort into making absolutely certain that we are not, possibly, executing an innocent person. Sure, people game and manipulate the system, that is the nature of people, but if we are wrong and we have incarcerated someone unjustly, as bad as that is, we can eventually free them. Once they are dead, if we were wrong, there’s no undoing that, is there? Is the chance that we might execute and innocent person just the price that we pay to protect ourselves? Or is allowing “almost endless” appeals the price we have to pay to ensure that we don’t become murderers ourselves; and that’s what the execution of an innocent person is. It’s not the cost of doing business, it’s murder.