Not great. Once you've done that, you're giving criminals an excellent motive for committing more murders in order to not get caught. There's an actual saying r

Not great. Once you've done that, you're giving criminals an excellent motive for committing more murders in order to not get caught. There's an actual saying referencing it: 'Might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb'. And executing people who commit crimes for political or religious motives leads to notions of martyrdom and often encourages people of a like-mind to join their struggles. Life imprisonment does much the same prevention job as the death penalty with much less baggage in terms of the ethics of killing people, or of the consequences of convicting innocent people, too.