Comment by coderenegade

Right, and that's the point.

The law isn't a moral benchmark, because morality shifts over time, both for what constitutes a crime, and what constitutes appropriate punishment. At various points in time, it's been legal to own slaves, illegal to be homosexual, and illegal for certain groups to vote (and I consider voting at all to be a subset of this); those laws (and ideas) were eventually updated, largely on moral grounds.

Similarly, most western countries no longer execute criminals.

But those ideas aren't universal, even today. Assuming that they are is imo, extraordinarily foolish, because there's ample evidence to show that they're not.