The crimes are horrific and the victims families want revenge, that’s what life prison sentences are for. Fundamentally, the state should not be an arbiter of life and death.
In the U.S. the state has never been an arbiter of life and death. A jury of peers decide that.
In a state where we struggle to house people, home prices are exploding through the roof, who bears the costs to hold those prisoners for the rest of their lives? to feed them, to provide them a habitable bed, cleaning supplies, medical health as they age and start to need increasingly more care?
That's a founding father of the USA, talking about imprisonment. When you extend that to state-sanctioned execution... capital punishment makes no sense, as it cannot be undone.
In at least some US states, the jury decides guilt/innocence but the judge determines the sentences for guilty verdicts. So in those cases the jury of peers is certainly not being the arbiter of life and death.
The constitution puts no limits on the power of a jury to acquit someone and it's absolutely despicable that judges have tried to usurp that authority under that pretext of following the rule of law.
If we want to make it harder for juries to acquit someone, then that should be written in the law; not invented by judges. Jury instructions must follow what the law says; not what judges want it to say.
> The decision to spare death row inmates is largely symbolic in a state that has not executed an inmate since 2006, though experts say it could save millions of dollars in court costs each year. Only 13 inmates have been executed since voters reinstated the death penalty in 1978.
Virtually all cases involving death penalty have a jury trial, higher stakes == higher priced lawyers, there are built-in automatic appeals, there are actually two separate trials for guilt and application of death penalty vs. one trial with a sentencing phase, etc.