Bland Acceptance?

Ann Althouse:

I've never understood why people who don't trust convictions agonize over the death penalty but blandly accept life imprisonment.

I've wondered about this too.

Wrongly depriving an innocent person of liberty may be an underappreciated outrage. The years lost are usually prime years. The person's life is typically devastated.

But I imagine such death-penalty opponents take comfort in the idea that they could partially rectify the injustice.

You can always unlock someone's cell,
but unexecution doesn't work so well.