$500 000 reward for Grim Sleeper serial killer - anything else?

NVDL: If a serial a killer started preying say on people you really cared about - say, on your family, and the killer went to jail after the first murder, was released after a term, came back, killed someone else, went back, returned, killed someone else - wouldn't you start to consider the death penalty? No?

Because a serial killer raises two questions:
1) How many deaths by a criminal - a repeat offender evidently addicted to murdering fellow human beings) - warrants similar punishment (if any)?
2) If none, in other words if government and police allow criminals back on the streets (for whatever reason), or if law and order simply cannot solve or contain such wanton criminality, when does vigilantism (a la Batman) become a logical last form of defence/resistance? Never?

If your position is that capital punishment is wrong no matter what, then you have to have something in place to contain the criminal who, because he remains alive, continues (or potentially continues) to exact an increasing toll of lives. The person who defends a serial killer's right to life eventually becomes culpable for the lives subsequently lost - where, for example, the serial killer was jailed temporarily and then released - something that it is quite common.

Seven women and a man were killed by the same handgun in a three-year period starting August 1985. The women had been sexually assaulted and their bodies were often dumped in the same alley in South Los Angeles. - Yahoo

clipped from news.yahoo.com LOS ANGELES - Authorities hope a new $500,000 reward will help them catch a serial killer who has claimed the lives of at least 10 women and a man in a two-part string of violence spanning more than two decades. All the victims were black and were found in or near South Los Angeles. Police believe some of the women were prostitutes. "I said make sure you go to the store and come back. She says, 'OK,'" Porter Alexander said. "She left, and that was the last time I saw my baby." Four days later, police knocked at the front door of the family home. They'd found her body in a nearby alley with a gunshot wound in the chest. A 13-year hiatus followed Alexander's death, police said, and investigators retired or moved on to other cases.