The retribution argument however can never work, because it assumes that errors are never made. If retribution is applied to the innocent, then a moral contradiction has occurred, and the state administering the retribution is guilty of a crime just as heinous as that of the retributee, because it involves the complete corruption of the idea of justice, which is different than written law. Laws are not worth much if they are not somehow connected with the idea of justice.

I’ve often thought that one could reinstate the practice of banishment to a location so remote that the person would be essentially on his own. Not in a place so forbidding as to be unsurvivable, but one so distant from people that they may as well be on Mars. In a sense, we would thereby acknowledge that we have no real moral solution to the idea of a person so repellent in his abject lack of sympathy and remorse that his continued presence in the company of society is impossible, and the moral stricture that it is not our place to make such life or death decisions when the possibility for error is present. We would put the onus back on God, who would favor or disfavor the survival of the person banished as He saw fit.