I think that any society that truly wants to be referred to as 'civilized' should not be killing people who have been found guilty to the legal standard of 'beyond reasonable doubt'.
How many times have we seen DNA prove the innocence of people convicted at a time when DNA testing was not available?
There are certain crimes committed where any normal human being can't begin to understand how anyone could commit such a crime. In my view though, our role should be to remove that individual from society for the rest of his life and to try and learn what, if anything, could have been done in that persons life to prevent the later action that he took.
Simply killing a monster who killed a young child doesn't bring the child back, and it doesn't allow us to learn patterns of early behaviour from the killer that may save the life of another child in the future.
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