being in favor of the death penalty is a position of virtue signaling gone amok. it's not a position anyone sets out in life to have, but one that's come to be out of a process of institutions becoming so powerful that they are no longer human or humane. the idea of people so bad and wrong that they must die at the hands of the state in order to purify the state is a propaganda tool that once repeated enough times, people come to believe in.

consider, for a moment, that when Jaques-Ignace Guillotine proposed the invention of a machine that could automate the royal beheading in order to replace the common hanging, he was writing to present the inherent absurdity of capital punishment. however the process of the worship of power has become so entrenched in sedentary society that this point was missed, and his countrymen built his machine and beheaded 17,000 in one year.

tl;dr: the core issue is virtue signaling and team-based politics