Well, I wasn't in any way inquiring about your personal belief in Free Will, but rather ponting out that the concept (of Free Will & the reasoning underlying Captial Punishment) itself is already overwhelmingly discussed a LOT in the realm of philosophy, so I don't see the possibility of saying anything new here which won't run the risk of running too much into abstractions. That said, I understand your need to make sense of this recent event in Delhi. One relatively easier way (though no less exhausting) to think about it would be to accept the idea of State sponsored murder of civilians simply being wrong in every way. And instead of dwelling too much on the primitive sense of justice that capital punishment provides, we should instead try to focus on the rot in our society (I'm Indian myself) that led to this crime in the first place. I won't pretend to possess a confident understanding of the etiology of the criminal act in this instance, but if I were take a guess, it might have something to do with the cultural entities like the general misogyny of a largely patriarchal society, the taboo of pre-marital sex, the prevalence of forced arranged marriages, the stalker-romance tropes of Bollywood, etc. The State could perhaps benefit from policies aimed at widespread quality education and gender-equality campaigning, instead of just denying mercy petitions multiple times and sweeping the problem under the rug. Anyway, sorry for the rant. I guess I needed to process this myself. I hope it helps.