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It kind of makes sense; if the alternative to death is life in prison, then that particular murderer wasn't going to kill anybody else regardless of which punishment they got. It's not like, say, the difference between a harsh prison sentence and probation, where one of them at least takes the bad guy off the streets. Nobody is suggesting just letting the murderers go.

And as for the deterrent effect, the problem is that, except in rare cases, murder isn't one of those crimes somebody sits down and thinks through anyway -- if you're crazy or desperate enough to kill somebody, odds are you're not thinking about your own future in any kind of logical way. You could change the penalty to "death via having weasels eat your scrotum" and it's not going to make a difference to the enraged jealous husband chasing a man through his house with a shotgun. That's the thing; if criminals were rational enough to consider what the law says and then act logically based on a carefully considered calculation of risk versus reward, they wouldn't be criminals.

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"Aw jeez, this is really going to look bad on my performance report."

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Robert Evans is Cracked's head of article captions and also writes about doubt, bad cops and worse media. He can be reached at revanswriter@gmail.com.

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