I would argue against this position for several reasons.
The first is that many cultures that practiced human sacrifice did not see it the way you are describing and it often happened to non-willing victims, such as the case in Norse communities as we can see from this horrific description:
“They laid him forthwith in a grave which they covered up for ten days till they had finished cutting-out and sewing his costume,” he writes, before revealing that a slave girl is then given the “honour” of following her master into the afterlife. The process continues with much drinking and merry-making, and the slave girl eventually compelled to have ritualistic sex with several men, who say: “Tell your master I did this out of love for him.”
Then, an old woman known as the “Angel of Death” takes control of things, supervising the preparation of the ship, and the recovery of the body from its brief grave, to be adorned in its final costume and then placed on the ship with rich foods and opulent ornaments. The slave girl, lolling and “bewildered” after drinking alcohol, is then introduced to the scene, and brutally stabbed to death by the “Angel of Death” with a knife."
They also strangled the girl as well. So she was raped, drugged and murdered, all on behalf of her master who wants her to continue as his slave in the afterlife.
I don't think this is in any way comparable to the death penalty. It's needless torture.
Or this,
In addition to slicing out the hearts of victims and spilling their blood on the temple altar, it’s believed that the Aztecs also practiced a form of ritual cannibalism. The victim’s bodies, after being relieved of their heads, were likely gifted to noblemen and other distinguished community members. Sixteenth-century illustrations depict body parts being cooked in large pots and archeologists have identified telltale butcher marks on the bones of human remains in Aztec sites around Mexico City.
This is clearly not the same as the death penalty. The death penalty comes with due process for criminals who are found guilty by evidence and reason, there's nothing ephemeral about it. The DP is a way of removing a criminal from one's community, meanwhile human sacrifice victims are often if not always innocent. Even the captured soldiers who are sacrificed would be innocent here. They have not been tried or given any kind of due process at all.
The reasoning is also different. Human sacrifice often arises from a desire to please a God, to prevent some kind of natural disaster and so on, or as a retainer sacrifice for kings and slave masters.
Secondly, ancient societies that had the death penalty did not see it as a sacrifice. The Romans would be a classic example; they worked tirelessly to obliterate the practice wherever they found it, they prided themselves on not having the ritual, and found it disgusting.
"In ancient Rome, human sacrifice was infrequent but documented. Roman authors often contrast their own behavior with that of people who would commit the heinous act of human sacrifice. These authors make it clear that such practices were from a much more uncivilized time in the past, far removed. It is thought that many ritualistic celebrations and dedications to gods used to involve human sacrifice but have now been replaced with symbolic offerings. Dionysius of Halicarnassus says that the ritual of the Argei, in which straw figures were tossed into the Tiber river, may have been a substitute for an original offering of elderly men. Cicero claimed that puppets thrown from the Pons Suplicius by the Vestal Virgins in a processional ceremony were substitutes for the past sacrifice of old men."
Other societies that abandoned the practice were Ancient Egypt in around 2,800 bce, Persia, Buddhist nations, Israel and others. By the Common Era most had abandoned it.
And yet these societies all had the death penalty. None of them conflated the two. It seems absurd to accuse the DP of being a sacrifice, when even those cultures which had it would not have seen it that way, and those who did use criminals for the sacrifices, such as Celts, would use innocents were there no criminals.
It's just not the same imo.
