Jeff Jacoby has this article in the Boston Globe with the above title. The article is also available (with less hoop jumping) own Jacoby's own site.

It doesn't take a social-science degree to grasp the real-world difference between facing vs. not facing a potential death sentence. Criminals grasp it too.

Dmitry Smirnov did. A resident of British Columbia, Smirnov was smitten with Jitka Vesel, a pretty Chicago woman he'd met online playing "World of Warcraft" in 2008 and then dated for several weeks. When Vesel ended the brief relationship, Smirnov took it badly. He returned to Canada, but kept pursuing Vesel by phone and online. When she broke off communication with him, he began plotting to kill her.

Smirnov returned to the United States in 2011, bought a gun and ammunition, and drove back to Chicago. He attached a GPS device to Vesel's car so he could track her movements. On the evening of April 13, he tailed her to the Czechoslovak Heritage Museum in Oak Park, Ill., where she was a curator and board member. When she came out after a meeting, Smirnov ambushed her. He shot her repeatedly, firing multiple rounds into the back of her head even after she had crumpled to the ground.

A deranged suitor? Maybe -- but Smirnov wasn't too deranged to first check out whether Illinois was a death penalty state. He headed back to Chicago to murder Vesel only after learning that Illinois had recently abolished capital punishment. When he was questioned afterward by police, according to prosecutors, he told them he had confirmed Illinois' no-death-penalty status "as recently as the morning of the murder." In an e-mail sent to a friend after the fact, Smirnov -- who voluntarily surrendered to the police -- made clear that he knew what to expect. "Illinois doesn't have the death penalty, so I'll spend the rest of my life in prison," he wrote.