Is capital punishment ethically wrong

I gladly accept the opportunity to offer my own take on capital punishment and the moral implications attached to it. Capital punishment, otherwise known as taking human life for cause (justified or not) has certainly been around for longer than the time of King Henry. The one thing Human beings have established is our ability to justify the killing of fellow human beings. The question the way I see it is not the act of ending a life itself but the reason or cause that led to that life ending to determine the moral implications to apply to it. For example, a person who kills to save their own life or the life of a loved one is certainly not evil. So this brings us to intent. If a person or Government is using capital punishment for nefarious reasons then of course that specific use of capital punishment is evil or wrong. If instead the person or Government is using the capital punishment serving the greater good or society then the use of capital punishment is moral. How do we measure or determine intent? That is murky and difficult to determine sometimes because it requires us to set aside our own opinions and look at the act itself and why it was done as well as the purpose it was serving. In the American use of capital punishment we take only the most egregious and heinous examples and set them aside for possible punishments to include capital punishment. This is done not only for the actual harm the criminal caused to the victim (s) but also to the great harm caused to their loved ones and society as a whole. The Government has a responsibility to provide if not the reality of security, the illusion of security to keep the masses happy. One of the ways Government does this is by severely and publicly punishing bad deeds that get the most people in society upset. Even those who are against capital punishment should agree that capital punishment does provide closure to many people in distress over what some "bad person" has done to society and allows them to move on. Some cases are easily defined such as Ted Bundy who's last victim was a little girl that I went to school with. After that incident my community went into hyper vigilance, parents patrolling the streets with their guns and all strangers seen with distrust and open hostility creating a opportunity for very bad things to happen as society in general felt scared for the safety of their children. This little girl was abducted from her school and the things done to her are not something polite people can discuss. Ted Bundy was a true monster and society "NEEDED" him to be executed to preserve the peace of society. Less easy examples are much harder to define such as Obama's expanded drone program that is reported to be executing more innocents than actual terrorists. Society is demanding action to be taken to fight against the rise of radical Islam but the method of drones is less clear as to it's effectiveness to the average person. Things like cost of trials and such are irrelevant to the moral question, our Government spends more on opinion polls and surveys than what we spend on capital punishment litigation. If the action is determined to be right then the cost is simply the cost and there is no point in dwelling on the cost. Errors of the past are also irrelevant. We killed a lot of people developing and perfecting vaccinations for diseases in the past, do those early mistakes mean we should never vaccinate children today? Like the development of vaccinations, America has made massive changes to the process to allow capital punishment and protect against wrongful convictions to include DNA evidence that makes the process much more reliable. We have long and detailed appeal processes to further protect against mistakes happening. Can we improve it further? Yes we can and we will, our legal system just like the medical field is always changing and improving because we want to do better. Lastly, I make a point that even a mistake in the application of capital punishment can still be moral for society. Going back to my example of the Obama expanded drone program we can see that at the very least society can view the President working hard to defend Americans against terrorists. This appearance of action can provide a calming effect on Americans who feel fear of a possible new terrorist attacks in the World and even at home. We Americans have allowed a massive change in privacy rights and given our Government permission to snoop into everything because of that same fear so clearly this is a big fear and anything done to reduce or eliminate that fear from the masses could be seen as moral. If the same scared masses were to have their fears unanswered, the mob mentality could set in and cause them to do very bad things, we have seen this happen many times in history so eliminating that threat is moral.