So you believe that terrorists should be tried under civil law? Because otherwise your example doesn't apply. And under civil law, if you try a person for premeditated murder, you have to address the "premeditated" part too, not just the "murder" part. So where do you limit premeditation? That the murderer decided to kill at the moment of pulling the trigger? When he got in the car to go do the murder? When he woke up that morning and loaded the gun? When he bought the gun? And will all of this be done without addressing WHY he did it?
You talk about excuses, but if he did everything in exactly the same way, but instead of killing an abortionist he was a gay man who killed a straight businessman wearing a Brooks Borthers suit because he had determined that they cause global warming, his murder charge would have been mitigated as mentally unbalanced even if he showed every sign of sanity and insisted upon his sanity. And there would have been a HUGE part of the trial dedicated to his thinking and reasoning process, and his explanations, and the presentation of evidence to support his thinking, etc.
The ONLY reason he wasn't allowed to explain why he did it, was because the prosecution, and the judge, knew his explanation would mitigate the murder charge or bring it into exposure, if not doubt, by allowing evidence to be presented about the horrors of late-term abortion, and thereby harm one of the bastions of the Democrat platform. After all, if it wasn't going to have any legal or political effect, why not let him speak?
This was a political whitewash. If he had had a fair trial, and been allowed to speak, he would have been jailed - but the crime would have been mitigated by the exposure of the murders of late-term babies, and the legitimacy of their lives would have been forced to have been acknowledged by the court. That they weren't so acknowledged, and granted legal consideration, is a tremendous failure of the law.
Remember, the same people who demand we extend "religious sensitivity" to the mass-murdering Muslim terrorists you mentioned, have succeeded in completely suppressing any religious sensitivity to this Christian man who stopped what he considered to be a mass-murderer. To equate these opposing scenarios and intentions is obscene. And to defend a process that was twisted into denying him his right to declare his reason for acting is, I believe, an undermining of civil law itself.
“So you believe that terrorists should be tried under civil law?”
No, I have never heard of a terrorist being tried under civil law. They are tried under criminal law.
“And under civil law, if you try a person for premeditated murder, you have to address the “premeditated” part too, not just the “murder” part.”
Under criminal law, you only have to prove that the killing was unlawful and intentional.
“The ONLY reason he wasn’t allowed to explain why he did it,...”
Roeder admitted he stalked and shot to death Dr. George Tiller, 67, on May 31 last year as Tiller attended church in Wichita, Kansas. He argued in court his actions were necessary to protect unborn babies.
“Abortions were being done every day,” Roeder testified. “My honest belief was that if I didn’t do something they would continue to die.”
http://www.theprovince.com/news/Kansas+found+guilty+first+degree+murder+abortion+doctor/2499879/story.html