> Seems pretty natural to me unless you happen to have an infinite negative weight assigned to killing someone, which I do not. I mean, I have a large negative one, but it's not infinite.

What's your negative weight on killing someone who is innocent? A justice system cannot be perfect. There are too many people, too many motivations/biases, and too much nuance involved. If a justice system is not perfect and it executes people, innocent people will have their lives unjustly taken from them by us. If it's 99.9% accurate (I'd argue that even 99% is an impossibly high bar), then an innocent person has likely been intentionally killed by the federal and/or state governments in the last 20 years. Are you cool with that? After execution, it's not generally possible to file an appeal on behalf of the executed even if new evidence demonstrates innocence. This has the implication of multiple injustices - an innocent person is killed by the state, the true murderer gets no punishment, and society incurs the risk of wrongful execution with no protection from the true murderer.

Or we could take the less expensive, partially reversible route of putting the convicted in jail until they die.

If you'd like to understand the imperfection more concretely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wrongful_convictions_i...