"We are mindful of their suggestion (made only at the argument, and perhaps not intended) that anything which serves to amplify the personal history of the defendant and by doing so furnishes clues to the causality of the crime for which he has been sentenced to death makes such a sentence less likely to be imposed. Causality is mitigation, the lawyer argued. Tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner. It is not an absurd argument. It exploits the tension between belief in determinism and belief in free will. If the defendant's crime can be seen as the effect of a chain of causes for which the defendant cannot be thought responsible-his genes, his upbringing, his character as shaped by both, accidents of circumstance, and so forth-then a judge or jury is less likely to think it appropriate that he should receive a punishment designed to express society's condemnation of an evil person. We consider a rattlesnake dangerous but not evil. Maybe if we learned enough about Walter Stewart we would consider him a person who had no more control over his actions than a rattlesnake has over its actions."
Judge Posner in Stewart v. Gramely, 74 F.3d 132, 136 (7th Cir. 1996).
Exactly. But I will still kill one if I find it in my back yard thus my belief and support in the death penalty.