I am kind of confused by your stance on capital punishment. You seem to accept that it is not a deterrent and accept that it is more or less just a "punishment"

I am kind of confused by your stance on capital punishment. You seem to accept that it is not a deterrent and accept that it is more or less just a "punishment". You also seem to accept that innocent people will get executed. So what is the purpose? "Punishment" seems an overtly emotional basis for such a stance, and "the dead got unlucky" seems rather callous. In my opinion, this is an awful lot of power that you are trusting to the state for weak reasons. Historically, the death penalty has been wielded by some people in power not just for crimes like murder, but also for more awful reasons like, say, people who had different opinions or were "other" ethnic groups etc. Were they unlucky too? Even in America, where our criminal justice system for all its lumps and flaws is still better than many, we have probably killed a couple of innocent people (the Cameron Todd Willingham case being the strongest evidence of an innocent person being killed so far). We probably would have killed a lot more innocent people had our bar for actually performing the execution not been relatively high (149 exonerated from death row since 1973 according to this CBS News article in 2015 -- http://www.cbsnews.com/news/30-years-on-death-row-exoneration-60-minutes/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/30-years-on-death-row-exoneratio...).