Hi Nick, I greatly respect you. You are a fighter for life. Thank you for sharing your perspective. I don’t think those who support the death penalty are themselves personally inhumane and did not say that in my post. I think the death penalty itself is inhumane in a nation where we can effectively secure violent offenders and prevent them from harming others. The ancient Israelites did not have the prisons we have today, which made the death penalty acceptable under those circumstances, as a means of protecting the public from the criminal. But the Bible doesn’t mandate the death penalty for modern America. Today we have the ability to imprison violent offenders for life. Taking their lives is unnecessary to protect the common good. Whether the death penalty is justified does not depend on the degree of confidence in a criminal’s guilt. In the modern world, the death penalty is unjust even for those we know are guilty. A crime, even a horrific crime, does not erase the criminal’s humanity. We have a duty to protect the public and to protect the innocent. But vengeance is the Lord’s alone. There is also a separate concern that I find compelling: entrusting the government—with all its capacity for overreach, corruption, bias, and human error—with the ultimate and irreversible power to take the life of one of its citizens. Our government has made terrible mistakes, and you have been a stalwart critic of government overreach and corruption. In my view, the most conservative position would be to say that, in modern America, the State should not wield the irreversible power of execution when it can protect society through life imprisonment instead.