There aren't many reasons for killing someone, I think. Basically, if you have extremely good reason to believe that the someone is so likely to commit an act of severe violence, so imminently that this is the last opportunity to stop them. So, let's say you're a cop and a very large, strong guy reaches into your car and tries to take your weapon from you. It's certainly plausible that the large guy will try to kill you with the gun once he's got it, so using deadly force in such a struggle might be justified--depending a lot on how the struggle arose and how it seems to be going. Once the strong guy has given up the fight and is trying to get away, the justification for deadly force is completely gone, although shooting him in the leg or something to try to arrest him may make sense. No matter what he's done before, shooting a guy that's 35 feet away, has several of your bullets in him already and has his hands up and is saying "don't shoot" as several witnesses have said, is murder. Since it was in the heat of action, maybe only second degree murder, but murder it was. If there's any evidence that the cop paused for a moment during his barrage of shots, even if it was to get out of the car to get a better angle, then it's first degree.
Essentially, this question boils down to "self defense". Self defense is always a justification for killing someone and it extends to protection of loved ones or others under your protection--the whole community in the case of a cop. But there's that whole thing about imminent threat: if you think there will be a good chance to stop the bad guy in some non-lethal way before he does his violent thing, then deadly force is not appropriate.
One of the things for which deadly force is the most inappropriate is if you are trying to get someone to convert to your religion. If you find yourself or someone else thinking it might be necessary, then you really need to question the validity of such a religion. Such conversions under duress can never be credible. There's a subtle but important difference between defeating an enemy in battle and them seeing the light and converting, and simply forcing. I'm against both things, but one makes a little more sense than the other.
I'm against the death penalty. It has never been applied equitably, and I'm pretty sure that under our present social order and legal system, it can't be--not to mention the rather alarming rate at which DNA evidence has exonerated convicted death row inmates. It's certainly not a cost saving: housing and trying death capital cases costs the state between 4 and 20 times what life without parole cases do. Over the last few years virtually every advanced country except ours has come out firmly against it. Essentially all physicians refuse to take part: they regard participating as a violation of their Hippocratic Oath to do no harm. This includes those physicians involved in the manufacture of the anesthetics used to do "lethal injection". Consequently all such drugs are unavailable and those who would continue to use lethal injection have been experimenting, without competence, with other things. We need to cut it out and join the civilized world.
There's one case other than self defense where killing someone is appropriate, and that is if the victim has decided that it's the right thing to do. For example, if someone has a painful, debilitating, incurable terminal disease, they may decide that there's no point in continuing to suffer. Painless euthanasia is clearly better than months or years of insoluble misery--as long as it's up to the victim, with no coercion. Death row inmates may take a similar position, Gary Gilmore and Ted Bundy both did this: they decided that the best solution was ending a life which had become intolerable to them. They went about it in different ways. I think this ok. I would prefer to try to cure them, or at least find out what made them tick. but they have the right to make such decisions about their own lives. Gilmore chose the drama of a firing squad, Bundy chose to trap himself where he'd be given the electric chair.
There is a group of people who think that all abortion is murder. Legally and biologically this is not correct. The courts have consistently ruled that if the fetus is not viable then it is not murder, although several states have used Roe v Wade's latitude to decide that non-viable second trimester fetuses are protected too. The court also determined that severe medical risk to the mother is also cause for abortion, even if the fetus is viable. Basically this is the same as the self defense argument. It would be nice if there were no unwanted pregnancies, but that is not the world we live in. There is a large societal need which will be met, whether it is legal or not. Thousands used to die every year from illegal abortions and many still do in the places they are hard to obtain. Legal medical abortion is a simple, fairly safe procedure. There are very few people seeking abortions who have not weighed it very, very seriously. Anybody who thinks otherwise does not have a credible opinion--very much like the people forcing religious conversion through violence. Such people are terrorists, pure and simple. The sidewalk outside an abortion clinic is not the place to provide such information, especially wrong information, as such people are wont to provide. The doctor or social worker inside is a much better resource.
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