When all the acceptable solutions are taken off the table, people start turning to unacceptable solutions. It's not good, because the erosion of social institutions will worsen the situation for everyone, but the only way to deal with this is to put the acceptable solutions back on the table. If we don't want to live and die through the inevitable consequences, our government needs to stop the corporate abuse of power that has led to this.
Murder isn't the same as homicide. By definition the death penalty isn't murder, because it's state sanctioned. Self defense, another example of legal killing, also isn't murder and most people who are against murder would consider a death in self defense to be justified and not murder.
Self defense can give mitigating circumstances in some legal systems, but it’s not an ethical joker to kill whoever we self-decreed feels as representing a threat.
For example, we can go into treacherous schemes that pushes our neighbors into paths where the only obvious option they can still perceive as a way to escape our shenanigans is an attempt to kill us, and as they come with this very real intention to kill us, press the button we had prepared to trigger some mortal trap.
> Considering that a lot of innocent people are murdered by the state via jury and trial in the US the distinction isn't very clear imo.
~211 people were killed via trial sentence in the US in the last 10 years [0]. Presumably some of them weren't innocent. In the same time period (conservatively) 8500 were killed by law enforcement outside of the legal process [1].
Both are problematic, but calling <20 people/year (out of a third of a billion people) "a lot" is missing the forest for the tiny sprig of moss.
You could easily argue the opposite is also possible to be true - if by "murder" you mean "killing" in general.
It's quite possible for someone to hold that a killing in self-defense is much more defensible than the deliberate execution even after a conviction and trial of someone who is "no longer harmful to society" because they're locked up.
Maybe. But do you have an example of a society that do both death sentence and provide fair trial plus peers conviction?
Making prevailing the idea that some humans can reach a level of certainty that is high enough to put a death sentence on some people they didn’t even knew before that is telling a lot. Like, we humans never make errors, we don’t have any kind of cultural and idiosyncratic biases, we never have conflict of interest and we can’t be manipulated by miscellaneous social forces.
Murder is bad, and murder en masse committed through institutionalized legitimating mechanisms is thus extremely bad, as as many times as bad as how many people it kills.
Legal murder through institutions never prevented a society to have "random" citizen going awry and kill other people, but it never missed to add supplementary threats to all their citizen.
But a murder carried out by a random citizen is still worse than a death sentence after a fair trial and convicted by a jury of your peers.