That's the (small) price society pays because:
> The death penalty can be abused
And history has repeatedly shown that there is no level of evidence that can stop someone being wrongly convicted.
And the death penalty is "the most reasonable solution" in those cases because? It's "too much" to keep people alive?
In that case, maybe don't have a system that gives life sentences with wild abandon -- e.g. for BS "3 strikes offences", etc., and has the biggest incarceration rate in the world by a wide wide wide margin.
Three strikes laws are idiotic, as are most manifestations of the US criminal justice system. I object to the knee-jerk reaction that the death penalty is inherently bad, in all cases, under any circumstances, and if you don't think so too, you're a terrible, awful, probably racist bigot.
Society can do much more than we give it credit for. Not all societies hold primitive eye-for-an-eye beliefs or worse.
>I object to the knee-jerk reaction that the death penalty is inherently bad, in all cases, under any circumstances
Well, societies that abolished it don't think so. At least their legislators and majority don't. Outliers will always think whatever they want (and grieving relatives of victims and such are the last that should be asked in those matters).
For me the death penalty is not different from things like torture, slavery, judicial rape, etc. Wrong under any circumstances.
Fine, then let's legalize euthanasia. Convicts who really prefer to die could do so. No need to the death penalty.
The death penalty can be abused, but there are some clear cases where it is the most reasonable solution. Charlie Manson has been in jail for 45 years; probably Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will be kept alive for decades as well.