Revenge is not a good motive though. It doesn't bring those children back. Removing people like him from society while not forgetting our humanity is all we can do.

I get that there are horrible people out there. No doubt. But the first thing societies like the US (and Colombia in this case) should do is to reform society to produce fewer of these people.

Much of Europe seems to have found a good recipe. Remove the desperation, especially economic desperation. Create equality. Promote health and community and less selfishness and greed. Focus on rehabilitation and productivity instead of punishment and passivity in prison systems.

Unfortunately, a lot of American leaders and voters see revenge as justice, many in the name of Christianity. Not exactly the Christian way from where I'm sitting, but that's reality.

That's what supermax prisons are for. Do you think they're pleasant places to spend the rest of your life?

You lock em up and just leave them there. Current estimates put the faction of innocent death row inmates at about 2%. That's completely unacceptable. Is killing a bad person out of revenge worth innocent lives when you can just lock them up for life instead?

For most of human history we didn't have the option of keeping someone imprisoned for life, so killing evil people was really the only permanent solution. It's understandable that that desire would be engrained in us. But if we don't have to kill them, shouldn't we avoid doing so so that we don't get innocent people killed?

Put yourself in the position of...

That is not how the law works. if the law worked based on how you would feel if you put yourself in the place of a person, you'd get "it would feel bad to be stolen from, but it would feel good to steal, therefore they are the same." If you could only place yourself in the place of the victim, no one would be innocent because it would feel bad, and thus they must be guilty. It's a ridiculous concept. What if I imagine myself as the father and I also imagine I don't care, should murder be legal?

He killed and raped x many people

So did the US army. Rape isn't punishable by death, for good reason. It's only added here as an appeal to emotion with no reflection on how it would impact legal process. Rape is very hard to prove, and also way more common than murder. Based on the average number of rape cases and the average length of a death penalty case you'd have half a million 20-year-long cases a year every year forever in the US alone.

Then when it comes to killing lots of people - obviously I'm not defending it, but lots of people kill lots of people. Tobacco manufacturers, car manufacturers, armies, secret services, the police, doctors when things go wrong - or even when things go right but the person can't be saved...

It's all well and good to look at one guy and say "this person should die," but the problem is the law has to be administered fairly and for everyone or there'll be no law, so when you look at 16,000 people per year every year, it looks very different .