I'm pro not letting criminals walk free to murder dozens of innocents. I'm still anti death penalty, and anti executing innocent people. Both can be true.

You cant have your cake and eat it too. an imperfect judiciary can be either too cruel or too merciful. in the former case innocents sometimes get executed, in the latter innocents sometimes get murdered by people wrongfully released from prison. Both are equally the fault of the judiciary, but in the latter case, the state is almost never actually held responsible. In the former case, it is much easier to have the state accept fault and pay compensation.

suppose we lock them all up instead, theres no guarantee that some moron politician isnt going to try some "rehabilitation" crap down the line, voiding decades of social cleanup.

Then we could talk about the costs of locking people up, and how those resources could be used to save innocent lives too. by investing in healthcare for example.

Though I guess that part could be solved by using labor camps. somewhere on Mars.

again, all this getting hung up on maybe a couple people wrongly executed every decade is missing the forest for the trees. how many people died of the state's incompetence during covid? Wrongful executions wouldnt amount to a hundredth of that in a century.