The Trump administration carried out 12 federal executions in the administration's final six months, as if the president was in a hurry to kill as many people as possible before his White House departure Wednesday. Among those executions were Lisa Montgomery, killed on Jan. 13, and Corey Johnson, killed on Jan. 14. There is no question their crimes were heinous and horrifying. They cast a shadow of sorrow over the victims' families that will last forever.

The issue, however, is whether the death penalty would have made any difference in deterring crimes committed by people who didn't know what they were doing and had no ability to distinguish right from wrong.

Johnson, who murdered seven people in Virginia in 1992, was intellectually disabled and could barely read or write at age 52. Correcting for aging norms, Johnson's IQ was 72.8, just above what is considered mental retardation.

No court ever heard of the extent of Johnson's intellectual disability, yet the Supreme Court has ruled it is unconstitutional to impose the death penalty on any person with an intellectual disability.

Johnson issued a statement before his death. "I want to say that I am sorry for my crimes. I wanted to say that to the families who were victimized by my actions, and I want these names to be remembered. Louis Johnson, Anthony Carter, Dorothy Armstrong, Curtis Thorne, Linwood Chiles, Peyton Johnson, Bobby Long. I would have said I was sorry before, but I didn't know how. I hope you will find peace."

He also said that the pizza and strawberry shake he ate and drank before the execution "were wonderful" but he didn't get the jelly-filled doughnuts he wanted. He added: "This should be fixed." Cold-blooded killers don't talk like this.

Johnson's case came on the heels of the execution of Montgomery, a clearly deranged woman who killed an expectant mother and cut her baby from her womb. She was the first woman executed in the federal system in nearly seven decades.

In a nearly 7,000-page clemency petition filed this month, her lawyers say her mother's alcoholism caused her to be born brain-damaged and "resulted in incurable and significant psychiatric disabilities." They also detailed Montgomery's claims of physical abuse, rape and torture at the hands of her stepfather and others and being trafficked by her mother for sex.

Montgomery's lawyers went on to say that they weren't arguing that she didn't deserve to be punished, but rather that the jury never fully learned of her severe mental illnesses as diagnosed by doctors.

There is no credible evidence that the death penalty deters crime more effectively than long terms of imprisonment. And states that have abolished capital punishment show no significant changes in either crime or murder rates.

There is also zero deterrent value in executions where the killer knows no difference between right and wrong.

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