system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
I Don't Know How to Feel About This Death Penalty Case

In my state there is a unique case surrounding the death penalty and I don’t know how I feel about it. 

To keep it really simple, a man was set to go back to prison and he killed a police officer as he was escaping.  His wife told police that the man dreamed to “'go out' like the characters in (his) favorite movie, 'Natural Born Killers.'" After he was arrested, the state began to consider charging the man with the death penalty. However, his wife and parents say that because of his death wish to be killed by the police, the proper way to punish him would be to give him a life sentence in prison—because giving him the death penalty is giving him exactly what he wants. 

So what I’m struggling to figure out is whether it’s more ethical to give him the death penalty for his crimes, or if life imprisonment is a cruel punishment because he wants the death penalty—despite the fact that it seems to me like the death penalty is normally a harsher punishment. How should I be feeling about this?
gpt
Well, what do you think the purpose of punishment is?  Is it retributive, rehabilitative, deterrence, something else?  And then, depending on which one it is, does that justify killing and/or life imprisonment, and should we consider the perpetrator's preferences when determining the severity of a kind of punishment?

In this case, it seems like the biggest part you're having trouble with is whether we should consider the perpetrator's preferences when determining the severity of a kind of punishment.  This is harder because we could easily imagine 'weirder' cases, many people might prefer to have an arm cut off to life in prison, although that's considered torture and not allowed by most western societies whereas life imprisonment is relatively standard practice.