Beautiful state Utah though. Zion is a truly incredible place, the desert is wonderful and the paleontological sites are fantastic.

"and it was C20 before any such actually came into existence ANYWHERE"

Abolishing state murder means more than proclaiming your credentials as a civilised society (a hypocrisy that most cannot afford to expose). It does however show that a society has started down the road to acknowledging killing people, however unpleasant and applying their crimes, is not the way to deal with them and collectively we're not going to condone further human suffering.

In this respect abolition of the death penalty is similar to the abolition of slavery; it's a fundamental rejection of a certain mindset. Just because it's always been done that way doesn't make it right, and stopping state murder and kidnapping, selling and owning human beings is one way of expressing a deeper compassion and desire for a better, more progressive society.