The reason I support the death penalty is not because I think it’s a deterrent, but because I believe that some crimes can only be punished by death, still if it’s also a deterrent that’s a positive in my eyes.
What gets little notice, however, is a series of academic studies over the last half-dozen years that claim to settle a once hotly debated argument — whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder. The analyses say yes. They count between three and 18 lives that would be saved by the execution of each convicted killer.
The reports have horrified death penalty opponents and several scientists, who vigorously question the data and its implications.
So far, the studies have had little impact on public policy. New Jersey’s commission on the death penalty this year dismissed the body of knowledge on deterrence as "inconclusive."
But the ferocious argument in academic circles could eventually spread to a wider audience, as it has in the past.
"Science does really draw a conclusion. It did. There is no question about it," said Naci Mocan, an economics professor at the University of Colorado at Denver. "The conclusion is there is a deterrent effect."
Two good arguments against the Death Penalty:
1. What if it turns out that they didn’t do it?
2. The DP will never be applied equally; it certainly isn’t now (e.g., blacks receive the death sentence at a higher rate than whites).
I’m confident that it’s a deterrent (likely is in, for example, Saudi Arabia), but that’s hardly enough to ovoercome the two problems noted above.
I find it odd that the study which the article focuses on seems to have been run by economists and not, for instance, criminal justice or even sociology professionals. Even accounting for the fact that 67.2% of all statistics are bogus, its kind of ridiculous for them to suggest a constant rate of effect here (one dead murderer = 18 fewer murders) which naturally becomes meaningless the closer you get to zero (what happens when you kill all the murderers and there are still murders? Or what happens if you’ve killed enough murderers to stop all murder, and then you kill one more murderer, do 18 people spontaneously generate?).
The main problem though is that this economical view tries to make it a cost-benefit analysis. Better not kill Doug today, or they’ll have to kill me back, and I can’t really afford that right now, for e.g. Well okay, firstly that tears a hole in the “rate” idea since we would only need to kill any murderers for that to work, not an increasingly optimal amount. Secondly, a killer who doesn’t think he’ll get caught isn’t concerned about the penalty and not likely to care, and a killer who does think he’ll get caught is either crazy or a “martyr” and not likely to care either.
Nothing I’m seeing in the article comes near to convincing that DP has a positive social effect (and certainly not one expressed as a rate) or that there’s even a rational cause-effect relationship there. The only safe thing I think can be said then is that, for instance, executing Charles Manson stops Charles Manson from killing and thats it.
1. What if it turns out that they didn’t do it?
Your average knuckle-dragging DP supporter would just retort, “Well, they probably did SOMETHING bad, so they deserved it.”
This study seems impossible to accurately execute, much less use to discern any knowledge.
It fails to answer the most basic question about capital murder and its relationship to the death penalty. That is to say, how many murderers–either about to commit crimes of passion or cold, calculated crimes of money/sex/whatever–said to themselves, “wait, if I go through with this plan and get caught, I’ll be put to death!”
Is that what stopped these people? Is that the only thing that stopped these people?
Also, again and again and again: one innocent person executed is one too many. And we’ve already surpassed that one too many several times over. The machine is broken, and perhaps is flawed by design, but we persist on trying to repair it while it’s still turned on. That’s Dumb.
The flip side to my points above is that right after a convicted murderer is put to death by the State, all of his victims come back to life. And that’s awesome.
From the YAHOO! link:
“…”We just don’t have enough data to say anything,” said Justin Wolfers, an economist at the Wharton School of Business who last year co-authored a sweeping critique of several studies, and said they were “flimsy” and appeared in “second-tier journals…”
The link says there were 60 executions, and over 16,600 murders. Just not a big enough data sample to be statistically significant enough to do a projection.
I smell a rat.
Oliver, I know you live in Maryland, a state currently having it’s own death penalty debate. The fact of the matter is, executions in MARYLAND (and the death penalty is a state by state issue) have been ineffective and cumbersome.
I direct you to a lengthy post covering the voice for repeal during the debate in the State Senate last year. Numerous police officers, criminologists, criminal justice workers, and exonerated prisoners spoke in support of repeal. Every single one noted that in their experience, the Death Penalty was not a deterrent at all.
So you can believe ONE STUDY (numerous others disagree) or you can believe the many others arguing the opposite, as well as the many police officers, victims, and criminal justice workers who call for the repeal of a barbaric, ineffective punishment.
And we’ve already surpassed that one too many several times over.
Really? When?
I worked for many years with convicted killers and murderers. A couple of serial killers too. IMO there are a some folks that just don’t deserve to be on the planet and they are bereft of any human feelings.
I have dogs that are more qualified to live as sentient caring beings than some of my past “clients!” in prison. Harsh. I know but it is how I feel.
Step back a second, Oliver. Are you attempting to argue that in over 200 years of American history we have never, ever executed an innocent human being?
Including during the 100-plus years of slavery and Jim Crow?
Is that really the argument you want to make? That our death penalty has thus far been infallible? Why was the Innocence Project even started?
If so, then you should also be ready to assume that everybody in Guantanamo is guilty as so-far-not-charged, and that everybody the military has killed in Iraq had it coming.
Oliver,
So in essence you believe that the government has the right to determine who lives and who dies?
I don’t find this to be terribly convincing. Most of what I have read on the subject has empirically been the otherway (well not as in the death penalty encourages crime, but that it does not have a noticable effect). The death penalty is mostly a state law issue. Finding demographically (in ethnicity, income, rual/urban mix, etc) similar states with opposite policies is difficult. Obviously you only have statistical evidence to go on and this (conviction and sentencing to death) is a relatively rare phenomenon. Still, I hardly think that this has been settled.
I’d point you to a well thought out book by Scott Turrow about his experience on the Death Penalty Commission in Illinois.
Most of the points I would’ve liked to make have already been made. However, I would like to share a new term I coined. From now on, I urge all opponents of the death penalty to refer to it as “socialized vengence”.
How about “State Sanctioned Socialized Vengeance”?
I didn’t say the death penalty was infallible, but I don’t know of a person executed in the modern post-Crow era who was innocent. Look, I don’t want to use the death penalty a lot but I feel for some crimes its the only fitting punishment. I also think it should be very hard to execute someone, but I believe that the option must remain.
But O, if you concede that the DP is infallible, then you must also concede that an innocent person could be put to death*. That’s the fundamental problem with the DP.
*And even before we get into any specific cases, it is a statistical certainty that innocent people have been offed by the state (yes even in the ultra-fair, totally non-racist post Jim Crow Era). Sorry, that’s the way it is. To deny that would be akin to denying evolution. Sorry, that’s the way it is.
You’re ignoring the obvious. What is it, something like 120 people have been freed from death row since 1973, with a number of those exonerations only coming thanks to DNA evidence? What, as we develop more sophisticated methods of determining guilt we get corresponding increases in the number of false convictions who are then freed by the new technology? If 20 people are freed thanks to DNA evidence, then exactly 20 people were wrongfully convicted?
It’s magic I tells ya!
I have never heard a position like yours regarding the death penalty. I find your position thought worthy and worth debate.
For me however I think the DP should be abolished, no matter how gruesome the crime.
bill l.
Indeed, that’s 20 for 20 who very likely didn’t do the crime would have been put to death in error. But I’m saying that that doesn’t matter. The mere possiblilty that it could is enough to negate the DP.
Also, while DNA testing is the bomb diggity, keep in mind that it’s not everything. Plenty of people get put on Death Row (let alone locked up) on faulty testimony and whatnot where there is no DNA factor (to convict or to exonerate).
Bottom line for me on the study is that they ignore the sentencing option ‘life without parole’. If a person gets that, they couldn’t kill 3 to 18 people, they’d remain in jail for their lives. It’s the same expense for life in prison as for administering the death penalty, btw. Isn’t life worse, really? And there’s no ‘executioner’, who really is all of us, right?
I live in Oakland, a city with a lot of horrible violence. The death penalty is just one more violent act, that IMO is just an extension of the violence on the streets. The DP is revenge, which at some point is cycle that needs to end.
I doubt if it really is much of a deterrent but if it is I’m still for civilization over more
barbarity.
“We’re not about vengeance, we’re about justice.”
The Justice League said that. And they live in the DC Universe, where even I accept that the death penalty is actually appropriate sometimes.
Nimrod - Did you happen to catch the fascinating Batman story in which the Joker was about to be executed for a crime he in fact did not commit, and Batman felt compelled to exonerate the Joker so as not to pervert justice, despite the obvious desire to be rid of the Joker once and for all?
A very difficult tale. I wish I could recall the title.
Are you saying that you think having a justice system, with police on the streets, prosecutors, courts, judges, and public trials is *not* a deterrent? Can you measure the extra deterrent, or even imagine one, from a death penalty? I can’t. Scant if there at all.
What does that mean, exactly, that “some crimes can only be punished by death”? It’s an illogical statement. Are we supposed to know what “some crimes” are? And are we supposed to agree with the assessment? Surely you wouldn’t say that you get to choose by yourself, so some agreemtn must be had. And death as punishment? For who? Family members? Children of the executed? Certainly not for the executed themselves - they’re dead. You don’t feel punishment when you’re dead.
I just don’t get it. I don’t need the extras of deterrence or non-deterrance for my case against the death penalty. Putting the unknowable into a justice system, which is at its core about using sense to confront senselessness, is backwards, contradictory, and illogical. We may as well add to possible sentences magical curses.
I propose a Manhattan Project-type assembly to create and maintain a spinning cube in space where we can put unsocial psychopaths for eternity or the rest of their lives, whichever comes first. A Phantom Zone, if you will. Where we can all be free of guilt as a society.
We’re not about vengeance, we’re about justice
What if it is about vengeance? There’s another saying, by a real person, not someone from a comic book: “Here, sir, the people rule.”
I’d say anonymous in chicago @ 12:05 above has the best take on this.
If a convicted murderer is in jail for life — real life, not 25 years with time off for good behaviour — they can’t kill those three or eighteen souls the study claims they might have.
And if the state turns out to have erred, and convicted the wrong person, why then they are still alive and can be freed and compensated.
For those cases where the state has convicted the correct person, I would think that life in prison is a much crueler punishment, from the point of view of the felon. Consider Canada’s Clifford Olson, or Paul Bernardo, both serial rapists/torturers/killers of young people: neither of these men will ever get out, we’ve made certain of that.
Consider what it means to a sociopathic killer to face the entire rest of his life without a single vulnerable potential victim within reach, and imagine how that must gnaw at them day after day after day.
Compared to that, executing them is clearly a mercy they don’t deserve.