Either there is an acceptable number of innocent people that can be executed, or the government never makes mistakes. Which is it?

I disagree, taking people’s lives especially premeditated like this surrenders your rights to our society in my book.

That's what prisons are for. They remove you from society for a set period of time (potentially indefinitely) in order to both punish you and protect others.

If the state had the ability to end his life a week before he killed, the minute he was attempting to kill or an hour after he killed would you still say they had no right then?

Flipping through the screenplay of Minority Report

It appears that giving a state official the ability to accuse individuals and summarily execute them for "pre-crime" would be an even worse idea than executing them in retrospect.

But in this case, I believe the fundamental problem with the American death penalty system is in how it overwhelmingly favors punishing the poor and uneducated while sparing the rich and well-connected. In this particular case, the problem appears to be a conflict of interests with his defense attorneys - a problem that would not exist if he'd had enough money to hire competent counsel. But we see time and again, instances of wrongful conviction (also see: The Innocence Project) and disproportionate sentencing particularly towards the mentally incompetent. We've also got a general problem with the executions themselves being beyond cruel, with "failed executions" become an increasingly common occurrence in our deplorably managed incarceration system.

What has changed in the period of those times to now?

Generally speaking, the judiciary recognizes expressions of remorse and efforts at rehabilitation/recompense to be mitigating factors in the wake of a crime (particularly crimes of passion or neglect). But these, too, are heavily weighted by one's personal wealth and political influence. Clemency from the governor/president can and has been outright purchased in the past. Meanwhile individuals who were almost certainly wrongfully convicted - most famously, Cameron Todd Willingham in Texas - have been killed after repeated efforts by the governor to prevent and forestall any attempt to re-litigate the case, entirely for partisan reasons.

Over time, we have accumulated an abundance of evidence to suggest that executions fail to deter criminal behavior, disproportionately affect people of low social status, and do periodically occur to the wrongly convicted.

In light of those facts, we have ample reason to end the practice entirely, at the absolute very least until we can consider the process more reliable and less prone towards political biases.

Despite the state's monopoly on violence, they shouldnt have the right to end their citizen's life.

• On average an execution costs significantly more than life in prison

• Even with overwhelming evidence, in some cases you can never fully remove the chance that the person being executed has been wrongfully convicted. Idk about you, but even one innocent person getting the death penalty is enough to fully ban in in my opinion.

• The majority of methods used to administer the death penalty (including in this case) are faux-humane and actually result in the person experiencing horrific, torturous pain while everyone else talks about how humane their death is

Frankly, I'd rather have someone rot in prison for decades

On top of what our Underpantsweevil said, when we dehumanize prisoner's, we open the door for other horrific acts by the state. With Nearly 1% of the US population in prison, and 76% of prisoners are forced into labor for pennies per hour, we essentially still have have slave labor in the supposed beacon of democracy.

Taking a step back, when we take all rights away from an individual, we are taking away their humanity. When we no longer view people as people, which we often do to prisoners and the homeless, we also are saying "that could never happen to me because I'm a human".

We shouldn't judge a criminal justice system by how it treats a societies most upstanding citizens, but rather those who have done the worst crimes.

Because we keep putting innocent people to death because our justice system is extremely corrupt. These people are already locked up and can't do harm in society anymore so maybe we shouldn't kill them if innocent people also get killed.

The state is both the axe and the scales. It decides who to execute and when.

Any discussion of precognitive abilities is irrelevant and fucking ridiculous. Not only can the state not predict murder, it's not particularly good at determining who's responsible.

It can, and has, executed the wrong person. It will continue to do so so long as it has the authority to.

This means that you, innocent of any crime, can be executed by the state should the state get that particular hair up it's ass. Though, weirdly it seems to mostly go that to black men.