For over thirty years there have been studies validating the deterrent effect of capital punishment.
June 11, 2007 was the sixth anniversary of the execution of the Oklahoma City bomber, Timothy McVeigh. Despite the claims of capital punishment opponents that executions do not deter murders, McVeigh has not killed anyone else since his execution.
Those who want to abolish capital punishment have propagated the myth that capital punishment does not deter murder. Some have claimed that every reasonable criminologist who studied the issue determined that capital punishment is not a deterrent. Presumably, their definition of a reasonable criminologist is one who believes that capital punishment is not a deterrent.
The facts, however, are quite different. Many criminologists – and other social scientists – have concluded that capital punishment is a deterrent (a salient fact that I routinely used to point out to my graduate criminology professors).
Indeed, a 2003 study, published in the Journal of Law and Economics – and reviewed in 2006 – determined that capital punishment did deter homicides. The study investigated:
. . . the impact of the execution rate, commutation and removal rates, homicide arrest rate, sentencing rate, imprisonment rate, and prison death rate on the rate of homicide. The results show that each additional execution decreases homicides by about five, and each additional commutation increases homicides by the same amount, while an additional removal from death row generates one additional murder.
This is not the only academic study that concluded capital punishment’s deterrent effect:
- A 2003 study by Emory University Economics Department Chairman Hashem Dezhbakhsh and Emory Professors Paul Rubin and Joanna Shepherd stated that “our results suggest that capital punishment has a strong deterrent effect.”
- Another 2003 study, by Clemson University’s Joanna Shepherd, established that each execution deters an average of five murders and that postponing executions reduced the deterrent effect.
- A 2002 Senate report declared there is a great deal of proof that capital punishment is a deterrent. The report affirms, “. . . there is overwhelming evidence that capital punishment saves a substantial number of innocent lives, deterring probably thousands of murders in the United States every year.”
- A November 2001 paper, presented to the American Society of Criminology said, “There has been a great deal of research conducted by criminologists on the effectiveness of the death penalty in preventing future homicides . . . While many of these studies find no deterrent effect there are other well designed research reports that reach the opposite conclusion.”
There have been studies validating the efficacy of capital punishment for more than thirty years, yet, if all you knew was what the mainstream media reported you would think science had proven otherwise.
The good news, though, is that despite the well-funded, anti-capital punishment misinformation campaign, helped by a liberal media, the public still favors capital punishment:
- A May 2006 Gallup poll indicated that Americans favor the death penalty; 65 percent favored it, while 28 percent opposed it.
- A December 2005 poll by the Pew Research Center revealed 62% of Americans favored capital punishment.
- A 2000 Zogby poll revealed that 78% of Italian-Americans, 75% of Asian-Americans, 73% of Hispanic-Americans, 71% of Arab-Americans and 64% of African-Americans favor capital punishment.
This last fact is significant because capital punishment abolitionists have tried to portray the death penalty as racist. This is a tansparent attempt to discredit those who favor capital punishment. Yet, this too is not true.
A 1991 Rand Corporation study by Stephen Klein found that white murderers received the death penalty slightly more often than non-white murderers. It also examined the sentencing disparity for the race of the victim. Rand concluded that although murderers of whites did receive the death penalty more than murderers of blacks, when controlled for variables such as severity and number of crimes committed, there was no disparity.
Patrick A. Lanagan, PhD., a Department of Justice statistician, studied the phenomena and stated that there was no evidence that blacks and whites were treated differently.
Here are some facts about convicted murderers that provide a perspective about capital punishment that you will not get from the New York Times and other liberal media. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, as of Dec. 31, 2004, 8 percent of those sentenced to be executed had at least one previous homicide conviction; 3.4 percent (101 murderers) were already in prison when they murdered someone.
Those who say capital punishment is not a deterrent, or who say life imprisonment is an effective substitute, should examine these facts. They would also do well to heed the words of Edmund Burke, who once said, "The men who today snatch the worst criminals from justice will murder the most innocent persons tomorrow."
I love people who argue that putting the death penalty to a crime doesn't deter someone from committing a crime.
I always point them to repressive Middle Eastern regimes where speaking out is a crime…where no one speaks out.
Who cares if the punishment serves as a deterrent to other criminals? Is that the purpose of the death penalty? Or prison? Or any punishment for that matter? No. The purpose is to punish the person who has committed a crime. It's really that simple. We don't levy fines, or put people in prison, or put them to death to prevent others from committing the same crime – we do it to punish the criminal for committing the crime! Using that same logic, we could literally get rid of every punishment we use in criminal justice. Just look, decades of having speed limits, and people still break them. Centuries of prosecuting corporate fraud, and look at Enron. Millennia of prosecuting theft, and there's still burglars. Obviously the punishments for those crimes do not serve as a deterrent, so we must get rid of the punishments. It's some of the most convoluted and nonsensical thinking I've ever heard in my life – perfectly typical of the left.
Well said Patrick. The argurment for or against the death penalty should not borne of pragmatism. Yes, it is a deterrent – that this is true for the perpetrator of the crime cannot be argued by even the staunchest opponent of capital punishment.
But the problem with arguing whether it deters or not is that if tomorrow it ceased to be a deterrent, would that make it a less appropriate punishment for some crimes – such or torture and mutilation of a child? Or if we found that the death penalty was an effective deterrent for failure to signal when turning (I'm willing to bet it would be), would that make it an *appropriate* punishment? Obviously not.
All this said, I understand the point of Mr. Tremoglies' essary. I don't think he is arguing from a purely pragmatic standpoint. He is simply saying that those who stridently insist that it isn't a deterrent don't have a rock-solid foundation from which to assail their critics.
And since we're on the topic of pragmatic arguments to de-criminalize certain behavior because it doesn't deter, let's not forget that we need to legalize drugs if we want the problem to go away. That will remove the profit, the crime, the suggling, the addiction – the entire problem. We can have free dispensaries run by the government.
Both justice and deterrence are important. Primarily, there are two foundations for criminal sanction.
1. To reflect the moral compass of the community. When a lawbreaker violates the social contract, the community shows the level of their discontent with that violation by the nature and severity of the sanction. This we call justice and/or retribution.
2. The law is contract for the community. Part of it warns those who would violate the social contract will suffer sanctions for those violations. Few people doubt that many crimes are prevented by the specter of punishment. This is deterrence.
There are many reasons given for criminal sanction, but these two are fundamental and are linked to all others.
My thanks to Michael P. Tremoglie, who has been a constant source of accuracy on the death penalty issue, when so many others have not.
Dudley Sharp
Forty years ago when I when taking a sociology class in Brooklyn College the subject of capital punishment was discussed.
The prevailing theory then, as now, is that the severity of the punishment was no deterrent.
I proposed a hypothetical scenario. "Suppose it was impossible to commit a homicide without being immediately identified, captured and convicted. In other words a certainty of punishment for murder.
"Suppose further that the penalty of committing murder was a twenty-five ($25) fine.
"Would homicides cease? Go down in number? Remain the same? Or increase in number?"
The answer was stunned silence because it was apparent to everyone in the class what the answer was.
Severity of punishment is a deterrent and almost all would agree there nothing more severe than having your life snuffed out.
I once read that if a person committed murder in this country these days, he stood a 0.6% chance of actually getting put to death for the crime. As a criminal prosecutor, I found that quite depressing.
Most of my life I’ve heard liberals say that we are a police state or heading toward being a police state. Actually, liberalism has brought us closer to being a criminal state.
I suspect the studies cited in this article are in the neighborhood of being correct but I don’t think deterrent effect is something that can truly be PROVED with empirical data. We need to stop paying for so many studies and rely more on COMMON SENSE which demands that we conclude that the death penalty is a deterrent. But Patrick is indeed correct, deterrence is not the only factor and not even the most important factor.
The Left always has and always will come up with bogus “studies” to promote their radical, subversive nonsense. What I can’t figure out is why so many seemingly normal people fall for it.
I loved NHGrouch's comments. I'll have to remember that the next time the subject comes up. Seems like a quick way to put somebody in a suitably reflective mood about their logical inconsistencies.
Speaking of which, am I the only one who has ever wondered why the left can argue so tirelessly that nothing is ever the fault of the criminal – that the individual was simply the product of negative external factors like poverty, a fatherless home, racism, etc.? But when that *exact* same argument (the role of negative reinforcement in influencing behavior) is turned towards the deterrent effect of capital punishment, it is summarily dismissed. Can you spell "schizoprenic logic"?
It must be wonderful to live in a world where facts can be used selectively at whim. So much easier than being encumbered with messy things like logical consistency.
I'm wondering if similar studies have been conducted for life imprisonment. Would someone seriously argue that if losing one's life isn't a sufficient deterrent, that life in prison would be? And if life behind bars isn't intended as a deterrent, and merely punishment, then where does that put the camp that protests against capital punishment as being "vengeance" in a rather interesting predicament. Oh, I forgot. Prison isn't about punishement, justice, protecting society, or maintaining a social contract. It's all about the criminal, not the victims. Prison is about *rehabilitation*.
Nevadamistermom: Glad you liked my comment. I hope it will be of some future use.
People ask, why is the extreme left opposed to capital punishment?
Are they? or are they just opposed to it when they are not in complete control of a nation?
The Bolsheviks were opposed to capital punishment until they took over. Then their use of it became SOP. And they were not the only hard leftists to do that. Just go down the list and you find that capital punishment, usually summary or with a sham trial, is routinely and excessively used.
What the hard left rails against when they are on the outside become SOP when they are in control…giving them absolute control. Freedoms become a thing of the past under them; laws become draconian, penalties more severe.
The bottom line, the hard left never shows its true face until it comes to power. In the meantime it relies on lies and false arguments to worm their way into the emotions of a gullible public. With them most of what they preach is not what they'll practice.
Patrick,
The number one use of the death penalty is as a deterrant. If people know that, if they kill someone (and are caught), they will be executed, crime will go down. If we're not worried about the message to future criminals (or the lack of danger of the criminal getting out), then there is zero reason to kill the criminal.
Thus, deterrance is a HUGE factor.
Patrick,
The number one use of the death penalty is as a deterrant. If people know that, if they kill someone (and are caught), they will be executed, crime will go down. If we're not worried about the message to future criminals (or the lack of danger of the criminal getting out), then there is zero reason to kill the criminal.
Thus, deterrance is a HUGE factor.
I find myself torn on this subject. On one hand, yes, a severe punishment ought to act as a deterrent to a rational actor. But what about the numbers of murders which occur due to irrational action? A scorned ex-spouse or lover for example. Does that person who acts out of "passion" rather than rational logical planning deserve the same punishment as a loan-shark who tracks down a debtor who has failed to pay?
And what of intent? Does murder 'a' automatically equate to murder 'b'? A driver who runs someone down unintentionally on a dark and foggy road has just as surely killed someone as has a paid assassin. Do they both deserve the death penalty?
I may have missed it if the author intended only premeditated murder to be in question here.
Retluocc:
Murder is defined as killing a person with malice aforethought. Only first degree murder (planned, specific intent) carries the death penalty (and not in all states). That would exclude the examples you gave. Killing in the heat of passion comes under second degree murder and in practice it sometimes results in even a lesser sanction.
The real test is, can you think of any person who was executed in the last 20 years who you think didn’t deserve it, considering all factors (aggravating, extenuating, and mitigating)?
Excellent discussion; and it is interesting for including the comments of people with some experience of our justice system. I once sat on a jury for a murder; and that, too, gives a person insight. Most notably, it forced me to bring all the arguments, principles, passions, and sense I could muster to judging a fellow human-being.
To partly answer Retluocc’s question, the distinctions between what is murder and what manslaughter, what is intentional or accidental, what bearing personal history or circumstances has or ought to have on punishment, and limits to power are reasons we have judges and juries. If it were a simple case of behavior-X automatically warranting punishment-Y, we’d have no need of courts. Our police would simply arrest and punish. This was tried and found unsatisfactory, often with gross miscarriages of the justice to which both society and individuals are entitled.
On almost every jury, there are some who are quick to judgment, some reluctant to judge at all but are bullied into it, and one or two who insist on a full review of the evidence and circumstance before passing judgment. It takes only one of this latter type to force the rest into deliberating properly; avoiding the pitfalls of a hasty judgment, not least of which is the later overturning of a judgment on an irrelevance. Those who want a quick verdict will argue the evidence is clear and deliberation a waste of time. However, the very term ‘judgment’ implies we consider more than what the law prescribes, that we also consider the ‘justice’ of the verdict in specific cases. For example, the two border patrolmen recently convicted of wounding a Mexican drug-runner are technically guilty; yet many consider the two innocent of wrong doing and their treatment a travesty of justice. A rash jury can easily be convinced a year or two later to repent and repudiate a verdict, sometimes giving real criminals an opportunity to escape justice. The jury that takes the time to deliberate properly is uniformly certain of its verdict and harder to budge from certainty later on. We also sleep better nights knowing we nailed the right bastard and not a poor schmuck some hot-to-make-a name prosecutor wants to convict.
Judges frequently instruct jurors to find in strict accordance with the law and the evidence, and not get sidelined by questions of fairness or justice or, even more importantly, any scrutiny of the law violated (jury-nullification, see http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/zenger/nullification.html). Everyone today accepts the Supreme Court has ultimate power to review and strike-down laws they see as unfit, but few realize this power is vested principally in the people as one of the functions of lay juries. The power of a jury is insufficient to overturn a bad law, but does give the people power to suspend a law in practice and bring its defects to our attention. In the case of government grown too powerful and insular, the power of juries to nullify is our last bulwark against tyranny. Liberal and institutional sources of information on this topic (see Wikipedia reference, below, as typical) repeat the claims made by lawyers and the courts that our ‘modern’ juries no longer retain this power, and support the courts in their contention juries are restricted to finding on fact and not judging the law. However, if finding on the evidence alone was the sole and proper function of juries, there would be little need or demand for them; and no reason for having enshrined trial-by-jury as a protected right. Juries convict far more often than judges (who are much complained of by communities repeatedly subjected to the same criminals), making them undesirable to those actually guilty of crimes. If nullification is not retained, then the verdicts of judges are superior to those of any juries based on greater expertise; and we long ago would have dispensed with juries and the added expense they entail. Yet, our founders and several centuries of English jurisprudence thought them important to the preservation of liberty.
(cont.)
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Juries were instituted because the law in early England was often arbitrated, and in need of resolution that satisfied all parties. Juries, therefore, were often chosen from among nobles or community leaders who stood between the crown (or church) and subject or between peers such as would satisfy contending factions. They not only provided a resolution or verdict, but dictated punishments, made arrests, arraigned defendants, summoned witnesses, conducted all discovery into the facts, &c; comprising all the modern functions of detective, jailer, grand-jury, judge, petite-jury, bailiff, lawyers, and (occasionally) legislator in one body. The first juries were instituted to resolve property disputes, but soon branched out to other areas of redress. Over the centuries, lay juries were replaced in most of these functions by professional jurists and lawyers. However, the power to overrule a bad law (or the misapplication of a good one) is one function that has never been surrendered, and it is only by omitting this fact that judges get away with instructing juries to the contrary. There is no Constitutional article or amendment surrendering the right to jury-trials; nor suspending any part of a jury’s functions, state laws overturning the functions of juries notwithstanding. Ergo, jury-nullification remains in force.
Trial-by-jury was a sore point between the British crown and colonists (see the 1735 case http://www.historybuff.com/library/refzenger.html, http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/zenger/zengeraccount.html, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zenger in which a jury disputed the legitimacy of a crown law outlawing seditious libel). The Zenger case was still fresh and a key event in late 18th-century discussions of rights; making it unlikely the founders meant anything less than retaining in juries the power to alter the outcomes of technocrats (as was increasingly common in English courts of the time). Note the last of the sources I give for the Zenger case. Wikipedia is an excellent source of information, but is often guilty of providing incomplete (i.e., biased) information. The Zenger case ‘is’ important for its 1st Amendment significance, yet Wikipedia completely ignores Zenger’s much greater significance (particularly to our founders) of jury-nullification, and has other specifics of the case wrong (e.g., Zenger was not acquitted by reason he told the truth as a defense against libel, he was acquitted despite a ruling precluding his attorney from introducing evidence supporting his ‘truth of the libels’ argument altogether) Despite the importance of the ‘truth’ test to later libel cases; Zenger was acquitted mainly because the jury understood the judge to be corrupt (in the pocket of Governor Cosby, the plaintiff) and using the courts improperly. Therefore, statements made at the time regarding ‘truth’ as a defense against libel could only have been a smoke-screen to prevent the jury from being overruled.
Most of us have been carefully taught that among our most precious citizen-rights are a right to vote, a right of speech, the press, a right to worship according to conscience, protection against self-incrimination, and protection against cruel & unusual punishment. All of these are passive rights without any power to them with which to counter government. Think about it for a moment and you must admit your vote is lost in a sea of voices and overridden by those with real power, we have a fresh outlet for speech (the Internet) but speech and the press have been monopolized by a handful of publishers, our pulpits – once powerful voices for course correction – are largely silent and obliged to government for their tax status, self-incrimination has been made irrelevant by sciences capable of making our DNA witness against us, and the logic of punishment has been inverted to the point our laws have no teeth left in them. Our more assertive rights include our right to bear arms, unrestricted assembly, petition, and, most especially, in our right to trials by jury, most of which are rarely mentioned and never by government. Few ever have cause to complain of our passive rights because government does not feel itself particularly constrained by those. It is only in our assertive rights government feels threatened; and has succeeded in marginalizing most of those to a point they are ineffective. Only the jury still has any real punch left, and it is there we can do something to reassert our independence. But to do so, we need to wrest control of our juries (both their functions and selection) back from the legal professions.
recommended reading: http://www.fija.org/
Mr. Stapler,
Would that more people who are called as jurors had your demeanor and wisdom. You've restored at least some confidence in me that all juries aren't as brain-dead as those who returned the O.J. verdict. Thanks you for your comments.
All,
There is a very succinct and powerful essay by Fred Thompson on this topic at http://www.townhall.com. The essay is dated June 27, 2007 and is titled "Common Sense on Capital Punishment."
I encourage you to read it.
The most powerful paragraph in his essay is the 2nd to last:
"I guess the most surprising thing to me was seeing an article about these findings just a few weeks ago by the Associated Press. The most interesting quote was from a well-known opponent of capital punishment who looked at the evidence and said, 'Abolitionists or others, like me, who are skeptical about the death penalty haven't given adequate consideration to the possibility that innocent life is saved by the death penalty.'"
In my comments to Mr. Thompson's article, I noted that the statistics showed each execution deters anywhere from 3-18 other would-be killers. However, the number of innocent lives saved is actually much higher. How many executed criminals of late were Johnny-One-Notes? Almost always, they are repeat offenders who took down multiple people, either in a single crime spree or over many. So let's say that each execution deters 10 killers from doing likewise. The number of lives saved is probably not 10 because there isn't a 1:1 ratio. It is probably more like 20 or 30 lives saved. For each killer that is deterred, many more kills have been deterred.
Wolvenbear,
Justice has always been the reason for the death penalty, not deterrence.
Deterrence is an outcome of the death penalty, not the reason for it.
Who would want to unjustly execute someone just to achieve a deterrent effect? Hopefully, no one.
The death penalty is supported because it is just for some crimes.
Many anti death penalty folks explain their opposition based upon the probability of executing an actual innocent.
This is my response to them:
Because innocents are at risk of executions, some wrongly presume that innocents are better protected implementing a life without parole sentence, instead.
What many forget to do is weigh the risk to innocents within a life sentence. When doing that, we find that innocents are more at risk with a life sentence.
First, we all know that living murderers, in prison, after escape or after our failures to incarcerate them, are much more likely to harm and murder, again, than are executed murderers. Obvioulsy, a truism.
Secondly, no knowledgeable party questions that the death penalty has the most extensive due process protections in US criminal law. Therefore, it is logically conclusive, that actual innocents are more likely to be sentenced to life imprisonment and more likely to die in prison serving under that sentence, that it is that an actual innocent will be executed.
Thirdly, 10 recent studies find for death penalty deterrence. Some believe that all studies with contrary findings negate those 10 studies. They don't. Studies which don't find for deterrence don't say no one is deterred, but that they cannot measure those deterred, if they are.
Ask yourself: "What prospect of a negative outcome doesn't deter some?" There isn't one, although committed anti death penalty folk may say the death penalty is the only one. However, the premier anti death penalty scholar accepts it as a given that the death penalty is a deterrent, but does not believe it to be a greater deterrent than a life sentence. The evidence is compelling that death is feared more than life – even in prison.
In choosing to end the death penalty, or in choosing not implement it, some have chosen to put more innocents at risk.
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Furthermore, possibly we have sentenced 20-25 actually innocent people to death since 1973, or 0.3% of those so sentenced. Those have been released upon post conviction review.
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