Waynetta, no, I don't think people who commit such heinous crimes will be reformed. I think there's a lot wrong with our criminal justice system. I don't think crimes agains property should be in the same category as heinous crimes agains people.
I do think deterrents can stop people from embezzling, from example. I don't think they are so effective against serious abusers such as paedophiles, nor that we should see any length of sentence as being enough to "repay society" for the actions of such people.
That doesn't mean we should allow the state to kill people. If murder is wrong, the state should not be doing it.
I think people who have convicted such heinous crimes should be locked up for life with no chance of parole.
I also think that - once locked up - they can also be very useful to us in terms of working out why some people become serious abusers, and for catching other such criminals, and this is a point which is often overlooked
I don't believe children are born to be abusers - something happens along the way. What is that? Is there anything we can do to stop it happening? Are we supporting children who have been abused enough? (Some go on to be abusers themselves. Most do not. What makes the difference?) While we don't fully understand how people end up becoming abusers, I think it's actually against the interests of society to kill them - scientists and researchers should be given access to them instead to try to use whatever information we can gain from them to make society a safer place. We can also gain information from them which will be useful in detecting new crimes / finding the perpetrators.
A practical example: it used to be commonly believed that flashers worked up to becoming rapists and abusers - that there was a kind of scale they graduated through. From talking to rapists, professionals have found that some of them like to flash women. It's not something they used to do, then moved on to rape. It's something they still do. That's not to say all flashers are rapists, but it's useful information in that the police should probably treat flashers a lot more seriously than they do now, and quite probably consider them as suspects for rapes.
If we kill all the rapists and paedophiles, we are missing a change to make society safer for the rest of us.
Killing them is more about revenge IMO than anything else; it's making us stoop to their level, and degrades us all IMO.
Also, as I've said, if you kill murders and rapists, you are effectively sacrificing innocent people to make that happen (this is inevitable!) and that can never be justifiable.