>It offers a catharsis to the victims or victims' families and acts as an ultimate punishment.
Does it? A catharsis would be to undo the damage he has done. This damage is erased only by long years of healing or suicide.
Look up catharsis in a dictionary. Also yes, victims' families are happy when murderers are executed. (It's not a good day in their lives, because they once again have to face the murder of their relative head on, but they do express satisfaction, and after that, things get better.)
Nice essay but would you care to explain why you're so opposed to permanently removing incurable offending pedophiles from the population?
I can explain. Because the standard of declaring someone guilty is "beyond reasonable doubt", which means the same punishment applies when the accused is an out and proud rapist and when there are multiple questionable links like verbal accusations, psych assessments, DNA (jurors don't know how it works and have it badly explained), computer networks, and stay tuned for deepfakes and such. In Russia, a Tor exit node operator (a massive faggot, but not a terrorist) spent a year behind bars being investigated for someone else's shitposting (could've gotten 17 years; the charges were later dropped). In the US, some guy was locked up because the EMTs who treated him for a drug incident or something brought his DNA to a crime scene. Again in Russia, a man got 12 years because the mother of his roastie girlfriend's felon ex told the girlfriend's 4-year-old daughter (by another ex) to "please" accuse him of molestation. The girl was taught to never refuse a polite request, see.
And if there IS a difference between "beyond reasonable doubt" and actual incontrovertible proof, rapists will make sure to not leave any of the latter.
Some of the evidence and accusations comes from friends and family of the perp. Friends and family will be more reluctant to come forward if they think "they" would kill the rapist by doing so. Jurors will cuck out and vote not guilty for the same reason.
Finally, corruption is a thing. Remember the miscarriage of justice which allowed Juicy Omelette to go free? Speaking of
Miscarriage, where's Shelly? False accusations of kitten rape are handy for a perp with ties to the local justice system to throw at witnesses and victims who continue making noise. After a couple of these stories surface, it'll be even harder to sentence real rapists.