[greeferweq]

The 'state' is made up of individuals. In the end it's a collective of individual people who come together to make a judgement on whether someone is going to live or die. And it's one individual who has the burden of administering the injection or working the trap door.

locking people up
extracting money from them (taxes)
requiring them to perform certain duties (jury service etc)
taking children away from their parents These - like punishments for crimes, including the death penalty as punishment - are all things done by the state/collective for the (alleged) reason of the good of society as a whole and the majority of individuals within it (locking someone up because they are a danger to others, taking a child away from its parents because its parents are harming it, taking taxes in order to fund services for the state population...) The death penalty indeed falls under that argument, because of course it would be unthinkable to allow a dangerous criminal their freedom, whether now or even 30 or 40 years down the line. But what does the death penalty provide in the way of benefit to other individuals in society that can't be provided by a life imprisonment? The whole thing is to protect people. Keeping someone in prison stops them from going out and killing or harming anyone again. Period.

I just feel that once you start to think of the 'state' as an entity separate from individuals, with its own powers, that becomes dangerous. I recognise that for practical reasons there are certain things in governance that have to be undertaken by a collective in order to work at all, but I still remain deeply uneasy about too much state control, and it pays to be very wary of the things that they already do control, even such things as jury service, the power of imprisonment, 'care' of children... and of course, taxes!