The US does routinely murder much larger numbers of people over much smaller crimes, like those fishing boats their AI thought might be carrying drugs.

If one were to use a fairly standard number for the statistical value of a human life, $10MM, then $126MM is about the same amount of harm as the deaths of 12.6 people.

(You have to choose some number as the value of a human life, and the power of the "statistical value" measure is that it is self-determined, derived from the choices people make for themselves of how much money to pay to reduce the risk of dying, aggregated and averaged. You are free to advocate for a different measure, but if so, you need to actually make the argument, ground your measure in something, something that you then need to claim is a better measure than people's own revealed preferences.)

That's not totally absurd if you think about it. Police regularly initiate high speed chases for bank robbers and the like, often for values far less than $1M. Of course, not every chase leads to a death, but I suspect if you do the math, the risk of a high speed chase is probably in the neighborhood of "JDAM for $126MM fraud".

Exactly, the moral option is obviously to allow them to get away with it scott free, or with a slap on the wrist so they can get back to re-committing. Better make it 252MM!