Namely that execution necessarily equals maximum justice for the murder victims and their families and that achieving such justice is worth the cost of (some, a few, many?) innocent lives. Don’t you have to make those arguments before you can chide anyone for being inconsistent about how many lives they’re willing to sacrifice?

Now people do tend to have irrational emotional reactions to perceived risk, I’ll grant you that. For most folks the objective risk of getting in the car and driving to the store is vastly greater than eating all the potentially salmonella-tainted tomatoes they might find there. And yet because a thousand people became ill across the country from eating something (maybe – not tomatoes it now seems), we have another crisis of confidence in food safety. But the several thousand people who’ve died across the country in automobile accidents since the salmonella story broke don’t raise an eyebrow. Why? Probably because people feel they have control over their own driving. Rightly or wrongly they feel they’re not being put at risk by forces out of their control for reasons that don’t benefit them personally. Good luck getting most folks to feel the same way about the food industry – or the judicial system.

Most people are a lot more willing to tolerate their own mistakes than the mistakes of a faceless, powerful system. And of course some accidents are the result of a mistake, some aren’t. Some are the result of what we used to call an act of G*d. It’s kind of hard to hang that label on a mistaken execution, isn’t it?