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actually, the mother was interviewed tonight and she said she was only present because she thought she had to be. Even she didn't think she needed to see someone die to feel "closure."
In response to your quip about the deterrent effect of the death penalty, firstly you should read the scholarly studies on the subject before making firm decisions one way or the other. Secondly, you're wrong on the empirical data on the average length of stay on death row.
For Average length of stay in:
California: 16 to 17 years
Florida: 11.8 years
Texas: 10.4 years.
You can't take one high-profile case and conclude that's the average length of stay on death row, which is what you unfortunately evidently did.
Thirdly, simply because you think the death penatly would deter individuals from killing another human being, or even due to the fact it deters you, does not lead to an inference that killers would be detered. For a number of reasons, you can actually think this through on your own without my guidance, but for the sake of the thread: does the death penalty deter you from murdering? I suspect a wide variety of social factors lead you to conclude you ought not to kill. The death penatly is reserved for particular crimes: none of which are likely to be detered at all. Serial killers, killing in the commission of a felony, killing a public official, killing multiple people, and etc. People in those situations are not, for one or many reasons, bound by their everyday rationale that we expect most people to wind through in their decision making processes. Even in this example of Tookie Williams, we have a case of a young man under extremely high levels of peer pressure, pressure to prove machismo, and highly atognistic and hallucigenic, mind & physiologically altering substances--not a very good recipe for rational thought about the consequences of one's actions. If you want to argue, so what, he's responsible, that's fine and I may or may not agree, although such a stance is particulary irrelevent to what you are claiming: that ordinary, rational people will weigh the cost/benefit of their actions and decide that the death penatly is too great a cost for their actions. This all breaks down further when we consider that a) almost universally criminals don't expect to get caught, and b) even more problematic, the most rational thing a person can do when they are confronted with witnesses to their crimes is to remove the witnesses. Had the police not been able to retrieve the tape from the convenience store, Tookie may well have been out of prison today or imprisoned for a completley different matter. Looking at one of his particular crimes, in fact, his mistake wasn't killing the victim, it was a failure to eradicate enough evidence.
That's a far more scary thought to me personally. You can't have both simultaneously, either you have rational actors, and then they be sociopathic in order to think across social mores and act outside the bounds of normalicy, in which case deterrence would work but then you have someone able to think across variables while committing heinous crimes and act within the same time frame in a completely rational manner and eradicate evidence of their wrongdoing. Or you have irrational actors who would normally act according to the social boundaries, but are unable for one reason or another, in which case deterrence would not work. Have you read Catch-22? I propose the same condundrum is faced by your conception of criminality (a conception that is valid to some degree in criminology, I do have to add to be fair, but vastly outweighed by a number of equally or more plausable explanations for crime).
BTW, when you read those articles on the efficacy of the death penatly, you can also conjunct them with studies on punishment in general. There have been found to be 3 main factors in deterrence:
A) certainty
B) swiftness
C) severity
Certainty and swiftness are the two that explain the most variance. AH HA! you say, I was right--execute the filthy scum swiftly and we set a blatant and stunning example in the town square. Unfortunately, we find that severity doesn't actually do much for deterrence (except in my aforementioned point that it may actually be counterproductive)...that means a lengthy prison sentence, or even any sort of punishment that is bound to be certain and swift, does much more for deterrence than the most severe punishment can ever hope for.
Couple that with the fact that your claim left out--that people are executed fairly routinely, it's not that we have a particular 25 year period where we kill en masse--and we become hard pressed to recognize how a young or old murderer would care about who is murdered by the state. To have any kind of effect we'd have to ensure that every potential murderer knew the cause and effect of someone on deathrow (say commits a murder on Tuesday, goes to the chair on Friday). But then that leads us to one of the most important earlier points I made: if you have someone standing in a convenience store about to pull the trigger, but contemplating whether they are going to get caught at all, you almost never will have a murder to investigate anyway.
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"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann
"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman
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