You might actually think about your talking points before blurting out simple-minded blather. No, public executions and punishment did not stop all crime. In fact NO known punishment, recidivism program, or crime prevention program has stopped all crime. Therefore, according to your "logic" we are needlessly being meanies and should cease arresting and punishing evil-doers?
Your rebuttal is a straw man. The one if the universal assumptions behind ALL penal systems is that the prospect of punishment has some effect of rates. Evil-doers are not entirely irrational, and only an idiot would think that absent punishment of robbers or inside traders that robbery and inside trading rates would stay identical.
Therefore, no harm in bringing back the wisdom of the 19th and early 20th century - there is nothing like the prospect of being fried in an electric chair, or shot by a firing squad, or burned at the stake, or drawn and quartered to focus the mind. And there is nothing more instructive - rather than letting the scum have free glamorized publicity to set a "score", let the hidden killers see their fate on big screen TV.
Finally vengeance is always a component of Justice, even when the state has denied individuals the moral right to exact revenge. Human evolution has wired our sense of retribution, the need to fully settle scores. Watch any movie wherein the hero is cheered when he vanquishes the enemy - who does not root for Braveheart or the Gladiator or Rob Roy to slay those who have killed their brethren or family?
Instead we have whiney, weak kneed, jelly spined liberals who can't bring themselves to properly punish mass murderers. They tell us to be more "European" like Norway - the Norway that saw the consequences of its weakness in Anders Behring Breivik, the man who has confessed to massacring 76 people, many of them children. His "penalty" under the law, 21 years maximum, in prison...serving a minimum of 10 years.
It is a moral obligation of the state to satisfy the loved one's need for settling the score: this man deserved nothing less than a painful and prolonged death.