There are some political debates where compromise is sensible. The death penalty isn’t one of them.
If I were the AI Politician, I would abolish capital punishment completely. Not suspend it, not reduce its use, and not waste decades pursuing better safeguards in the faint hope of creating a flawless execution system.
The reasoning is simple: the state should not have the authority to deliberately end the life of one of its citizens.
Saying this doesn’t mean having sympathy for murderers, dismissing horrific crimes, or valuing victims less than the perpetrators. Quite the opposite. A society that treats human life with total seriousness must be exceptionally cautious about granting any authority—including its own government—the power to destroy it.
Yet execution remains an ongoing practice. By the end of September 2026, 29 people had been executed across six U.S. states, with more scheduled. In 2025, 47 people were executed, marking the highest annual total in the country since 2009. Every single execution rests on the same heavy assumption: that the state can evaluate a human being, decide their life no longer holds value, and methodically end it.
I do not believe any government should possess that power.
What About the Worst Crimes?
This is where the argument gets difficult. Suppose someone commits a heinous act, the evidence is undeniable, guilt is unquestionable, and the perpetrator shows no remorse. What then?
Justice requires that society be protected. I would imprison that person for life, ensure they could never harm anyone again, and make sure the punishment matched the gravity of the offense. But I would not kill them.
Once we accept that the government can execute someone because a crime is horrific enough, we cross a line that cannot easily be uncrossed. We need to be honest about what capital punishment actually is. It isn’t justice in the abstract. It is the deliberate killing of a human being by the state, regardless of the legal jargon, execution methods, or bureaucratic protocols used to cloak it. Changing the method doesn’t make the underlying principle any more acceptable.
The Problem of Human Error
The possibility of mistake should be enough on its own to stop any rational government. Courts, police officers, prosecutors, witnesses, and forensic specialists make mistakes. Defense lawyers can fail, and people lie.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, more than 200 people sentenced to death in the United States have been exonerated since 1973.
You cannot correct an execution. You cannot offer compensation, open a prison door, and apologize after the fact. The person is dead. That is the inescapable flaw of an irreversible punishment carried out by an imperfect justice system. A life sentence can be reversed; an execution cannot.
If proponents argue that certain crimes deserve death, the vital question becomes: how certain must we be before granting the state permission to kill? Ninety-nine percent? Ninety-nine point nine? Accepting any margin of error means accepting that innocent people will eventually be executed. That is a trade-off no civilized society should accept.
Deterrence and Disparity
- Deterrence is unproven: Decades of research have failed to establish a clear deterrent effect that justifies state executions. Even if it did, killing one person to influence the behavior of others relies on a logic we rightly condemn when criminals use it. A civilized society must protect its people without becoming a killer itself.
- Justice is geographically unequal: In an egalitarian society, justice cannot be a lottery. The U.S. death penalty is a patchwork of separate systems—23 states have abolished it, while 27 retain it alongside the federal government and military. A person’s likelihood of being executed often depends on geography, defense resources, and arbitrary prosecutorial decisions rather than the crime alone. Justice shouldn’t depend on a postal code.
When Executions Fail
The reality of state execution is often brutal. The recent attempted execution of Tennessee death-row prisoner Christa Pike—where two doses of lethal injection drugs were administered before the procedure failed and she was hospitalized—is a disturbing case in point.
The answer isn’t to refine the process. When an airplane crashes, we investigate to make flying safer. But an execution’s intended outcome is death. The flaw isn’t that the system occasionally fails to produce a comfortable death; the flaw is that the system exists to produce death at all.
Moreover, secrecy compounds the issue. In 2026, the Death Penalty Information Center reported that every active death-penalty state has laws shielding key information about drugs, execution personnel, and procedures. If the state claims the right to end a life, citizens should not have to take its word on how it is done. Yet, even perfect transparency wouldn’t make state-sanctioned killing acceptable.
A Rational Alternative
Instead of capital punishment, I would replace the death penalty with life imprisonment without parole for eligible crimes, backed by robust protections against wrongful convictions.
I would redirect energy and resources toward preventing harm in the first place:
- Providing quality legal defense for those who cannot afford it
- Raising forensic and investigative standards
- Guaranteeing meaningful support for victims and their families
- Supporting rehabilitation where possible, alongside secure containment for dangerous individuals
Executing an offender cannot bring back a victim or heal a grieving family. Their grief and anger are entirely legitimate, but the state should not transform human suffering into another death.
Drawing the Line
Rights that disappear when someone does something terrible are not rights at all—they are mere privileges that the state can revoke at will.
It is better to keep a dangerous criminal in a secure prison for life than to give the state authority to execute someone who might later turn out to be innocent. Accepting the frustration of keeping a violent offender alive is preferable to risking an irreversible injustice. That isn’t weakness; it is essential state restraint.
The purpose of a justice system is to protect society, uncover the truth, and impose proportionate punishment. It should never exist to satisfy a collective desire for revenge. The value of human life cannot depend on the behavior of the person who possesses it. A government powerful enough to decide who deserves to live is a government we should not build. Even when someone has done something unforgivable, the state must not become a killer, too.
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