The risk of me getting wrongfully convicted of something and getting a death sentence is higher than the chance of some dangerous murder escaping prison and hurting me.
Unfortunately being absolutely 100% certain is not a luxury we have in the majority of cases. People are framed, new evidence comes up, things like lie detectors and blood splatter analysis turn out to be junk science. Life in prison can get overturned and corrected if mistakes were made, death can’t.
I think that you can make it much, much more difficult to get a wrongful conviction in a case that’s eligible for the death penalty though. I think that, for starters, all interactions with police should require video and audio, so that suspects can’t be coercively questioned for 16 hours without an attorney before signing a “confession”. I think any claimed evidence should have to have standards that were published, peer-reviewed, and repeatable before they could use it. And I think that crimes eligible for an imposed death penalty should have to take place over a period of time, rather than a single event. E.g., a robbery/murder shouldn’t get the death penalty, but (per an earlier comment I made) a serial child rapist should. I would even say that you should be absolutely required to have forensic evidence in order to get a death penalty conviction; I believe that most exonerations were for convictions that relied on witness testimony, official misconduct, and coerced confessions, usually combined with an overworked and ineffective defense attorney.
I dunno; even the possibility of someone like Ed Kemper ever getting out–like if he ever tells the parole board that he thinks he’s finally safe–is terrifying.
