Look bro I've been where you've been arguing with people online and trying to justify your opinions more than you try to listen to what the other person has to say or just feeling misunderstood. I probably shared the majority of your political views just a month or so ago and would have done the same.

You'll share a link to something you maybe just skimmed over or move the goalpost a little or admit you aren't really that knowledgeable to lessen the blow a bit. It sucks being in arguments where you feel like you're being attacked on all sides for something you simply "know" to be correct.

Trust me when I say that a lot of the people in this community and instance really knows things and have perspectives way outside your worldview. They get things wrong sometimes but tend to get generally well read. Trust me when I say to give them a shot and listen. I made a post a while back asking for resources and information about communism/socialism and the stuff they had me read shattered my world view. Give them a shot, trust me. They are a lot nicer and more accepting than you think.

You're trotting the goalpost back, whether you mean to or not. Death sentences represent a substantial liability to the state, because killing someone on the basis of an accusation that turns out to be false is a danger, one that is worse with a faster turnaround to these events. The state is happy to have false convictions, so long as they don't cause the boat to rock.

There are surely even true-blue people like you who help promote these measures on some high-minded basis of minimizing infringement on the rights of citizens, but what has been most consistently demonstrated by the state is that if lofty liberal principles come into conflict with material interest, the latter wins. If the state gave a shit about "rights" among the general population, we wouldn't have hundreds of de-facto summary executions per year doled out by the cops (this making allowances for actual violent conflict, since the total number of killings is past 1000)

The simple fact of the matter is that these long periods of internment work as an alibi for the state and, most egregiously, allows for the killing to be carried out with substantially less ado. This is a well-tested method that is notoriously used for the crimes of federal agencies wherein they wait a few decades and then publish what they did once things have cooled down, defusing the liability of another discovery like Cointelpro.

Ok, and you don't think that if they weren't explicitly concerned with the appeals process or the questionable mental health of the prisoner, that they wouldn't just execute them immediately?

You are hopelessly naive.

They're not concerned with whether it hurts people or there simply wouldn't be death sentences at all.

What they're concerned with is convincing heavily propagandised naive dumbasses that they're acting with good intentions, and implement the bare minimum that they're politically pressured into implementing in order to achieve that without fundamentally changing the core of the system itself.