Remember that people did escape from Alcatraz. And Devil’s Island, IIRC. Never underestimate the ingenuity of prisoners that really, really don’t want to be prisoners.

I think that the death penalty should be used in extremely limited cases, cases where there’s not even a shadow of a doubt about guilt, and where the person has committed multiple heinous crimes spanning a period of time (say, >1 year). So a simple mass murderer wouldn’t be eligible, but a serial child rapist would be. You’d also need to have forensic evidence that at a minimum cleared the Daubert standard, and you’d have to exclude forensic evidence that relied on standards that hadn’t been published and peer-reviewed. So DNA and fingerprints would be in, but forensic bite impression analysis would be very definitely out.

I think the evidentiary bar should be extremely high for death penalty cases. I think that it’s currently mostly applied to people that don’t have enough money to get better legal counsel.

I would also say that convicted people should be able to request the death penalty rather than life without parole. I can’t speak for anyone else, but if I had the choice between decades in prison, or being summarily executed, I’d take execution.