it is fundamentally inhumane to kill someone that knows it’s coming (mental torture)
That killing serial killers causes them harm isn’t a particularly compelling point, since we disagree over whether harming them is, in fact, good.
risk of executing an innocent
This is a good point and one I would explore further. However, it leaves open exceptions where the evidence is overwhelming.
it is hypocritical to kill someone for killing
Killing isn’t always bad. Killing innocent creatures is bad. Killing serial killers is tantamount to putting down rabid animals.
No, I am genuinely against the death penalty.
It’s important not to conflate moral facts with practical policy. Most of your arguments focus on how people should be treated, whereas the relevant question is how governments should behave and why. These are very different things.
Regardless of what people deserve, no government should go around killing its own citizens. That is because killing as a punishment makes a spectacle of death. It is profoundly unhealthy for any civil society to revel in death. That’s the answer. It has nothing to do with what serial killers deserve. They do not matter.
Killing serial killers is tantamount to putting down rabid animals.
A serial killer can be removed from society and prevented from having an opportunity to kill. “Putting him down” is just you stooping to his level out of misguided self-righteousness
A rabid animal is suffering from the final hours of a horrible communicable disease that is 100% fatal. It’s in horrible pain, out of its mind, and you are doing a mercy to end its misery
Listen, if you want to keep a psychopath alive in your basement for some unknown reason, well, as long as he doesn’t get out and maul anyone that’s fine by me. But you’re insane if you think normal people should spend their hard-earned money contributing to that exercise in immiseration.
