The death penalty, especially for political offenses, always seems nice when its your side in power.
When “our side” is no longer in power, “they” might introduce the death penalty. What's to stop “them”, once they are in control? Our good faith?
Limits on state power do not reliably prevent bad governments from abusing it, because bad governments can and do weaken and circumvent those limits. Are constitutional limits meaningfully stopping Trump? Did they keep Putin from the presidency?
In my view, this logic is another case of “when they go low, we go high”. The only reliable way to prevent the abuse of state power is to keep those who would abuse state power from attaining it in the first place.
If you reject the states power to execute it's own citizens and make that idea unacceptable to the people then you take away one of the fascists' best tools for oppressing the people.
Execution may be unacceptable to some of us, but –crucially– it is acceptable to those who would most abuse it, and they will cheer its reintroduction.
You propose to instill a deep conviction –that the death penalty is unacceptable– in a broad majority of people:
How?
You put it like we haven't tried. You put it like we can somehow do it. That contradicts current trends: political violence in particular and violence more broadly are becoming more and more acceptable again.
By then it will be far too late.
The system and all its guardrails are actively failing before your eyes and have been for over a decade at this point. In fact, the system –capitalism– isn't really failing, but simply succumbing to its own contradictions and evolving into its next stage: fascism.
No. It's neither fear nor hate. It's not a tribal proposition either. It's an instrument of last resort to preserve our chance of building a fair system.