MacGrath--There may be links, but are you sure which is cause and which is effect?

My other afterthought is, how can we say executions have no deterrent effect when we have no way to clone the world and test it both ways? The only comparisons we can make now is between different countries/cultures, one "with," and the other "without." Comparing, say, Ireland with the US would be fuzzy, I think, because of the very many historical, cultural, religious and every other type of differences. I don't see how we ever get a "controlled" experiment in the scientific sense. Maybe there would be even more terrorists if we didn't execute some of them.

CC