Dictatorships have death penalties. Why does the US have it?

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It surprises me as a non American and a citizen of the UK that most states in the US have the death penalty alongside more authoritarian regimes such as North Korea, China, Iran, Saudi Arabia etc. Russia doesn't even have the death penalty. The UK abolished it in the 1960s because of many miscarriages of justice like that of Timothy Evans and Derek Bentley. France abolished it in 1977. I feel torn about the subject because I know there are some crimes that are so hideous that they do need to punished but I feel as though we let too much emotion get in the way which turns into revenge. I have thought well what is justice then if it is barbaric to both execute someone and keep someone in prison for the rest of their lives ?

I think that a lot of voters find it to be entertaining when it gets in the news.

"Because supporting the death penalty is MANLY and you gotta be TOUGH ON CRIME or else you're a BLEEDING HEART PANSY who doesn't care about the GANG WARZONES that American cities have become, as opposed to the GOOD OLD DAYS when US cities had 0 crime!! GRRRRAAH I'm so full of MANLY America-loving I need to go punch a wall and chug a 12 pack of Sam Adams!! !"

In all seriousness, it's a combination of racism (non-whites are prospective criminal threats to white civilization and must be eliminated if needed), toxic masculinity (see above), and the "frontier" mindset (principles of forgiveness, due process, government non-violence, and rule of law don't account for the brutality of frontier life).

Always worth remembering that it is overwhelmingly self-described Christian, "small government" conservatives who support the death penalty. Christian in that they say they're Christian--not because they actually value dumb things like forgiveness or pacifism. And small government in terms of property rights--they lose sleep at night at the thought of the bleeding hearts actually trying to limit the governments' ability to kill US citizens.

My conjecture is:
Dictatorship is a quantitative thing rather than binary, and there's an element of it in all nations. Though I gather in the UK that capital punishment wasn't abolished by referendum, it was done by Westminster, and it's been said that the people would have kept the death penalty if they'd been asked, and possibly still would for some crimes. Wasn't it put forward as an argument against full democracy, the kind where everybody can vote on every law? As for the USA, I wouldn't be surprised if capital punishment has strong popular support in many states.