These well-meaning liberals are so confused. Society has a right to protect itself from evildoers, and this pair of career criminals had gotten off the hook so often in the past that they simply learned that a jail sentence is no barrier to repeating the crime once the opportunity arises again. In the case of murder, many murderers who are allowed to live end up killing again (another inmate or a guard) even if they are kept in jail for the rest of their lives. So society is not protected by allowing them to live.
There is no such thing as “restoration” in the case of murder. As for retribution, we no longer practice blood vengeance and exterminate the killer’s entire family, as is done in primitive societies. In any case, true retribution would take the form of raping them and then burning them to death, which is what they did to their young victims. Nobody is proposing that.
They need to be removed permanently from society. Furthermore, the fact that they are removed by means of death shows the gravity of their crime. Once a society starts to treat murder as just another misdemeanor - which it did in the 1970s - it devalues all life and even social structure (which in good part is directed at keeping us from murdering each other or being murdered by each other). The death penalty shows exactly how important society considers the life of the innocent to be and how seriously it takes a violation of this basic rule.
And when murderers are freed to kill again,
those who freed them effectively sentenced the future victims to their own death penalty.
I put this in front of a anti-punishment lib, and he appeared confused for a moment, then the libfilter kicked in and he said that it was the price we have to pay in order to make sure the innocent are not punished... (followup - what about the innocent future victims? - it got circular after that.)
Nailed it.
How about we feed them to the reavers?