It's a pretty simple thought process, admittedly :/ I just think the death penalty is something that should exist, for the worst offenders; mass murderers, serial killers, the REALLY big fish.

My reasoning for this is two-fold: firstly, having been through jail at one point (not sitting out a warrant, but for a moderately severe crime...felony 1A, TL;DR used to sell drugs, got charges dropped and released, got sober.) I KNOW how depressing it can get in a place like that. It sucks, it really does. Some of these worst offenders, twisted as they may be, are still human. They have to live with what they did, every day. Some of them revel in it; worse, they're PROUD of it. And in my personal opinion, if you're proud of dragging some poor soul down a highway with your truck (which is a more unfortunate part of my state's history ), you might just deserve lethal injection.

But still others, that resent their actions and might genuinely regret doing them, well, they WANT to die. This raises a problem, and a solution: it's surprisingly hard to kill yourself in jail (also learned from experience...TL;DR diagnosed major depression for most of my life, jail felt like the final nail in the coffin, made an attempt and failed, got put in solitary for remainder of my stay in county), but the prison also NEEDS to clear spaces for other potential inmates, because crime never sleeps. So if you resent your past transgressions and honestly WISH to die, wouldn't it be nice if the prison-industrial complex would not only let you, but pay your way to do so?

Finally, even in states where the death penalty ISN'T a thing, isn't a life sentence basically the same thing? Currently in the states, we don't view prisons and their ilk as a way of rehabilitating their captives before releasing them back into the world, but as a form of punishment, causing prisoners to resent the very system they were incarcerated by, which leads to repeat offenders (and a rather scary amount of people saying "fuck the police", but that's an entirely different conversation). Is it more human to lock someone away and throw away the key, PERMANENTLY taking US tax dollars to keep them incarcerated in a little cell, where some will ultimately lose any concept of the outside world, succumb to any number of mental illness, and ultimately die of natural causes as a ward of the state? Personally, that sounds just as twisted as the death penalty to the people that argue against it.

Sorry for going on a bit of a rant there, but I do hope I've explained my stance on the matter.