Thanks, McGrath — almost exactly what I was about to write.

Paul Revere, to my knowledge, never engaged in terrorism. Mandela, although he engaged in treason by plotting to overthrow the government, did not engage in terrorism. I think I probably would have argued for life imprisonment for him, simply to avoid making a martyr out of him. If he had actually commited murder in the pursuit of his pollitical goals, yeah, I'd have killed him.

And I don't know a lot about William Wallace (except that some screenwriter made his story into one of the silliest pieces of Hollywood drivel I can remember — almost on a par with Titanic) but after what Edward I (the Hammer of the Scots) did to Wallace's tribe he was justified in waging war. Again, not terrorism, in my estimation.

I find it really bizarre that some in this thread are arguing against capital punishment from the standpoints of "possibilities" or "hindsight." If we were able to predict what a person would be a few years after the fact, it would give any well-intentioned person or anyone with enough money to buy social approval license to kill at least once or twice. They could always point to the fact that in a few years they would be setting up orphanages and all kinds of philanthropic trusts and nobody would want to punish him too much. If we could have predicted Hitler, I think somebody would have killed him early on, don't you?

As for arguing from hindsight — the Patrick McGee example springs to mind — there was nothing at the time to indicate he was anything more than a political thug and he still doesn't seem to be doing enough to atone for his crimes, in my estimation. I don't think he ever could.
But that aside, as Marx pointed out, we can only know the future from the past. At the time of his conviction, McGee's past indicated he was one nasty piece of work. I see no reason, from that point in time, to spare his life. He might have been martyred, but the IRA already has enough of those so he wouldn't have been much of a big deal.

cheers,

david