No, it is not state-sanctioned murder. Under the common law, murder is the unlawful killing of one human being by another with “malice aforethought.” We have a problem in modern society of people seeing things they don’t like and applying the most emotion-laden epithets to those things that they can think of. The death penalty may not be a good thing, but it certainly isn’t murder. The law classifies it as “justifiable homicide.” Anyone who has witnessed both an unlawful murder and a lawful execution can attest that the two events are so far apart that they’re on different continents.
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