Death penalty...and Dexter

I've just recently started watching season 3 of Dexter, and am about halfway through. Dexter, a serial killer in his own right, is really a vigilante of sorts, a la Boondock Saints. The thing with Dexter is that he, as he explains in the show, needs to kill. Its in his nature to shed blood, and he has chosen the supposed moral path to being a killer. A forensics leader in the Miami Police Dept. he really has his pick on the worst of the worst. He, for the first time, recently killed a child molester that had never killed. It 'broke his code' but he still felt good about it.

I find two inherent problems with this image, and I think the writers do a great job of involving those who support capital punishment, and therefore likely support Dexter's vigilantism (if they don't believe in the judicial's system like the ADA Jimmy Smits does) and those are pacifists or against killing another human being in prison, regardless of the crime. My problems with Dexter are that I think any human is capable of overcoming a biological difficulty. Instead of trying to do this, even as he becomes a family man, he just succumbs to this psychological/biological need to kill. I suppose one with dementia could never really overcome dementia, but the desire or need to kill, if we are looking at it from a strict scientific point of view, it is feasible to overcome. The man does not even see a therapist, nor does he have an attorney to confide in (until Jimmy Smits really, and even then he hides his ritual). And the one man he does confide him supports this unhealthy addiction.

My second issue is that killing humans is simply wrong. Killing a man who hasn't killed, as the pedophile that he killed, is no worse or better than killing a murderer, but even he had a code and broke it for this innate urge. Truly, pacifism I feel is not completely feasible in a world with fear and hate, although these are both human emotions that can be overcome, however that does not take away from the fact that it IS possible, however impractical. In Dexter's reality, where there is no exercise of self defense, the truly only justifiable defense of killing anyone in my belief, he kills for revenge. Killing for revenge or for a vendetta is inherently immoral. Killing is simply the most, by definition, inhumane act that could ever occur.

Alas, I enjoy the show because it sparks discussion like this, but I do feel that it helps spread the message, however insignificant or significant, that killing for revenge, i.e. the death penalty, is okay and justifiable. Furthermore, I feel that with the death penalty, even the trivial chance that an innocent could get killed, the potential for an innocent man to die is too much to justify the killing of anyone. So many men on death row have been exonerated after several appeals. Our judicial system may be faulty in great lengths, but it certainly isn't Dexter's job to pick up the slack.