This is a….novel take, in defense of capital punishment.
I think a big part of the Evangelical take that Christ’s death on the cross redeemed us of our sins is that Evangelical’s are uncomfortable with a story where their central religious figure is condemned by the state and ultimately executed. They like the state and want its approval, and so they need to reimagine the story of the Gospels such that the state’s actions in executing Jesus and his death are not a tragedy cutting short a person’s life, but actually the fulfillment of it, the state doing its part in something even grander than itself. Even at the level of its basic theology, the Evangelical movement writes over the Gospels to praise the state
I think this gets things backwards. These people like the death penalty and want to keep it. They also believe that the only “right” reasoning begins in the Bible(and especially the Gospel[1]). So, that requires them to justify the death penalty through the Bible not so much because they believe in it as because they use it structurally in their lives. Their reasoning is not “The Crucifixion was good, and therefore everything that helped bring it about was good”(see how they’ve used it to vilify Jews for centuries), but rather “State-Murder is Good(so long as it upholds the hierarchies we prefer), Reasoning is only valid when it is founded in Biblical exegesis(and even then only so long as it confirms our priors), so The Bible MUST justify and require State-Murder.”
They aren’t arguing from the bible to the death-penalty: They’re arguing From the death penalty, TO the death penalty, USING the Bible.
[1]Or to put it another way: because they find their identity in it and use it to justify the hierarchies they construct and uphold. Or to be more explicit: they don’t care about its message so much as its content(the words on the page, not their meaning) and the social role they’ve given it(as a basis of authority and legitimacy).