That’s not why I am a death penalty supporter, but there’s new research.
According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented.
The effect is most pronounced, according to some studies, in Texas and other states that execute condemned inmates relatively often and relatively quickly.
The studies, performed by economists in the past decade, compare the number of executions in different jurisdictions with homicide rates over time — while trying to eliminate the effects of crime rates, conviction rates and other factors — and say that murder rates tend to fall as executions rise. One influential study looked at 3,054 counties over two decades.
“I personally am opposed to the death penalty,” said H. Naci Mocan, an economist at Louisiana State University and an author of a study finding that each execution saves five lives. “But my research shows that there is a deterrent effect.”
It should be hard - very hard - to execute someone. But we should have the option.
Sigh. Please don’t go bashing some idiotic “media research” group like Brent Bozell’s bunch of clowns then turn right around and hand pick a quote from an article to claim the article supports your point of view. The article doesn’t support your point of view at all. The next few paragraphs after your quote:
It doesn’t sound to me like there is any reason to assume that these studies definitively prove anything.
And this:
Do you understand its ridiculous to say I cherry picked something when I link to it? Unless you want me to put up the whole story.
No, you don’t have to post the whole story. But are you suggesting that you presented article and the quote you pulled in an accurate way? Because you didn’t. You might have said, “there’s new research, it’s disputed, but here’s why i’m convinced …”
I hate to disagree, Oliver, but I’m sure cutting hands off in Saudi Arabia discourages theft too. That doesn’t make the barbaric practice an acceptable “option” that should be practiced by any reasonable civilized government.
Magazone makes the larger point here of course — leaving aside the fact that these studies are disputed.
Cutting hands for theft is idiotic. Executing someone for murder or mass killing is perfectly logical. If these people don’t get to live, why should this guy have lived?
Cutting hands for theft is idiotic.
Sorry, Oliver, you just argued that deterrence was a perfectly reasonable justification for state-sponsored barbarity. Now it’s idiotic? You can’t have it both ways.
Executing someone for murder or mass killing is perfectly logical. If these people don’t get to live, why should this guy have lived?
The eye-for-an-eye justification is the definition of barbarity. Like it or not, cutting off hands makes about as much sense and is about as logical as state-sponsored execution. The death penalty does, after all, exclude us once again from the ranks of every other civilized country in the world (except Japan, who have only executed 39 prisoners in 14 years), and instead puts us in the company of countries like China, Saudi Arabia, Cuba, and Afghanistan.
If you believe that the state has the right to take a prisoner’s life, then there is no reasonable way to object to torture or any other form of abuse. The moral line you’ve drawn is off the charts.
Oliver, killing someone for killing someone is idiotic as well.
If you could prove to me that the death penalty is always applied fairly and only to the guilty, then maybe you’d have a hope of convincing me that the death penalty is a necessary state function.
Otherwise, the system is just as broken and undependable as, say, the missile defense shield. We should have ended the death penalty the first time it was proven that an innocent man was put to death. Instead, we just pretended it was an aberration that would never happen again.
“If these people don’t get to live, why should this guy have lived?”
Im sorry there’s an inherent logic in here? Is it a logic we can apply consistently across all crimes? A rapist should be raped, for instance?
Well if the glove fits…
I didn’t say I endorsed the deterrent argument. I personally don’t believe that a possible killer decides to not kill because the state has the death penalty. But I think that for the most horrible, heinous crimes, we need to have the ultimate penalty on the table.
My question is this: how is death a more horrible penalty than lifetime incarceration? And in the most horrible, heinous cases, how is lifetime incarceration in a small, rarely-opened SuperMax cell a “better” penalty than death?
Death happens and it’s possible that the condemned won’t even remember he was punished (because he won’t remember anything at all). Why is that a more severe penalty than allowing the murderer to be alone with his thoughts until his body finally shuts down?
The death penalty satisfies us. And it still doesn’t bring our loved ones back.