adfgiionio

I don't quite understand what you're saying.

There are a lot of people who aren't shy about supporting the death penalty simply because they want suffering and death. There are others who don't care what's happening in the world, give in to peer pressure, or honestly believe executions have practical value. Those aren't the same problem as simply cruelty.

Execution is vastly more expensive than keeping people locked up. This is well documented. Shortening the appeals process enough to make it cheaper than prison would be radically authoritarian and would result in even more innocent people being executed.

No, no, no, and no.

You could go further than that. You could kill someone for hurting an animal. You could kill someone for threatening arson. You could kill an entire army in wartime for no reason beyond wearing the wrong colors. In all of those cases the killing is justified by more than just bloodlust. I am not a pacifist.

Executions are different. People are not afraid to admit that they support executions because they like knowing that hated people will suffer. That is not something I will consider acceptable under any circumstances. If there were any evidence that capital punishment served a purpose beyond feeling good I would change my tune. But there isn't, so I won't.

Most people, moral or not, would never kill. Most people rarely feel a desire to kill, and most people know they would feel guilty for killing someone. A person's feelings will keep them in line even if their character won't. The police add an extra incentive.

But executions change all that. Whether or not a person supports capital punishment reveals if their morality is a flimsy thing of feelings and self-interest or a thing of principle. It is safe for someone to hate a heinous criminal and wish them ill. There's little fear of guilty feelings or reprisal. The average person will give in, baying for blood purely because they want to see the hated person suffer. A good person will refuse to hurt others no matter how badly they want to.

Capital punishment is a good litmus test. It reveals those who are murderers deep down inside.

Who said anything about the state claiming ownership of this software? That's a huge leap of logic. We are talking about removing the state's power to use secret software at trial. This is a restriction on the government, not on the software authors. Any changes to copyright are irrelevant here.

We have pretty good proposals to deal with this problem that make no changes to copyright. I think the following seems pretty sensible:

https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/4368

I don't know the specifics, though.