Death penalty safeguards get framed as prioritizing guilty lives over public safety

Evidence

Efforts to add more procedural safeguards to prevent wrongful executions are often dismissed by retentionists as valuing the lives of the guilty above the lives of the innocent public. Calls for suspending the death penalty until legal flaws are remedied are also rejected on the grounds that more innocent people will be murdered. This view assumes that the death penalty is a better deterrent than lifetime imprisonment, which is very much in dispute empirically. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1929