The pervasiveness of Twitter is no longer a story. But the types of people who use it, and the settings from which they tweet, continues to amaze.

This, I admit, is one I never expected.

I am still thinking about how I feel about the tweet and its circumstances. I don’t, though, have to think about the death penalty, which I oppose on every ground that some use to support it.

In fact, the absence of an empirically verifiable deterrent effect of the death penalty on homicide rates was, I think, lesson #1 or #2  in criminology grad school. I don’t know if it was before or after the lesson about the extent to  which the mass media distorts what actual statistics tell us about the frequency and  characteristics of specific types of  crime.