The death penalty makes no sense.

[The Grand Nudger]

I can frame it a different way.  We should kill him because he deserves it.  I mean, don’t you believe in secular, objective morals?

I do, but why would you think that my secular objective morals included a provision for state sponsored murder?  It's not as if the existence of objective secular morals means that someone deserves to be killed by fiat.

If we contend that by violating someones right to this or that they themselves forfeit that same right and we will act in kind..we end up with a spiral of vengeance, not a system of justice.  The problems with that sort of thing are profligate..not just in our system but throughout all of human history.

That’s a bit of a slippery slope, don’t you think?

It's a massive slippery slope..we've gone down it many times.  That was exactly why I pointed it out, as yet another reason the death penalty isn't among our brightest ideas. It's the latter part, ofc, that's the offending slope. The first half is simply a recognition that vengeance and justice are not equivalent.

I understand vengeance (I've been known to exact little chunks of it from time to time, lol). I also understand that the death penalty is supposed to be justice...it's part of our justice system..we don't have a vengeance system (ostensibly).