According to Camus, this doesn't eliminate a community's right to self-defense. But where the matter at hand is crime and punishment, there are other ways to protect the community from murderous miscreants. Camus is not moved by flabby sentiment. He develops the pro-death penalty side and moves with surgical precision to defeat each argument on its own terms. Let's be clear about what is happening, Camus argues.
Executions are a matter of cold premeditation.
Unlike Starkweather's bloody spree, the state's killing is meticulously planned. The condemned person is led to an almost antiseptic chamber, where he is strapped down and injected with sodium pentothal or electrocuted with 2,000 volts. Because the task is so grotesque, no one person is assigned culpability. Camus insists that we make a wager on life, not death. Camus knows that human beings are not naturally good.