Bah! Humbug! Stop asking people to make moral differentiations! Shoot ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out! Much more satisfying! (At least for people who find philosophy and ethics boring and prefer rules of the fundamentalist kind.)
I sometimes wonder if all these guys who talk so cut-and-dried about vengeance and “justice” could actually kill someone like Terry Sedlacek, obviously a man who’d suffered terribly from this disease for a decade, in cold blood. What is so attractive about the concept of justice without mercy?
Certainly certain retribution will have no deterrent effect on a person with true mental impairment. But who will get satisfaction out of the death of a truly mentally ill person who has committed murder and cannot understand the punishment?
Perhaps somebody with mental ‘issues’ themselves?