Dylann Roof sentenced to death for Charleston church massacre

To me five things stand out for me preferring life without parole to the death penalty:

• Science looking at every known society or population in all of known human history has shown no deterrent effect ever for capital punishment on crime
• If I had to choose death or living the rest of my life in prison I'd choose death every single time as less suffering.
• Human governments, courts and juries make mistakes (whether honest or through corruption). You can let a person out of prison.
• If you're a free country that allows appeals and requires reasonable safeguards against the last bullet, then it's FAR cheaper to keep someone incarcerated for life than to manage a fair appeals process and an expensive humane execution process.
• The types of people who commit the very worst of crimes see execution as a goal and a heroic end, so it becomes a kind of reward.

There are a lot of people that oppose it on moral grounds, and if it came to it I might fall into that camp. Still the pragmatic and/or scientific grounds for opposing it grab me before I have to fall back on feelings about morality.