The DEATH Penalty

[Angrboda]

The death penalty should be reserved for the irredeemably evil serial paedophiles, murderers and the like.

People for whom there is no chance of change or redemption.

Unfortunately there tends to be an inverse relationship between the narrowness of the criteria and the effectiveness of the entire scheme. The more constrained the criteria, the more difficult it is to definitively demonstrate that an individual meets that criteria. This has two effects, it raises the administrative costs associated with capital punishment beyond all reason, and it also makes the process more fallible so that a larger percentage of the class which is deserving of the punishment escapes the administrative process designed to ensure that those in the class are punished. There's also the problem of reversible harm in that, if, as an exception to the general rule of not executing "ordinary" criminals, an innocent or ordinary criminal is punished under this criteria, that makes the relative magnitude of the error greater. (For example, suppose now you would execute 5% of murderers, amounting to 684 in one year in the U.S., and two happen to be innocent. Compare this to the case where you execute 0.05% of murderers, or 7 in one year, and one turns out to be innocent. The relative harm done to the innocent is greater.)