Blood Debts and Human Sacrifice:

Shorter me: the death penalty is human sacrifice. It's blood magic.

Longer me, amalgamated from a discussion elsewhere:

"It’s the persistence of blood magic, the ancient and nearly perennial belief that the spilling of blood expiates crime.

It’s literally magical thinking – that the past can be redeemed or altered, and that epiphenomena can be animated, by the doing of current deeds.

The death penalty is human sacrifice.

At the risk of reading as a broken record, it’s an attempt at blood expiation, at rewriting the unalterable past by way of present actions, at “righting the order of the world.” Perhaps the gods aren’t invoked as often, but the same “balance restoring” logic is still employed: if the Gods/State/Society aren't expiated with a blood offering, more bad people will [insert unexplained magical mechanism] arise.

People who believe that the social order depends upon this sacred or mystical balance, and also believe in the human sacrifice that is the death penalty (or, let’s be honest here, locking up pot growers for their productive adult lives), will go to great political lengths to preserve that order.

Are you a death penalty advocate? If so, you have to ignore the disconnect between the arguments about functionality/process/legal merit and the ineluctable fact that the executed person’s death does not and cannot alter the past. Human sacrifice might feel good (that’s the emotional point of vengeance and its lawyerly cousin, punishment – to feel good about hurting someone with the sanction of peers, to get away with violence against those who “deserve” it). It might allow the beneficiary of that violence, or the one committing it, to feel as if order is restored. But it doesn’t erase the actions which allegedly merit punishment. Because we cannot alter the past.

No debt is paid. No balance is restored. No past acts are eliminated or erased. It’s just another de-animated corpse where a person once was. Because, while the magical thinking is real, the magic itself is not."