The StandDown Texas Project

Pull the Switch on the Death Penalty

That's the title of an editorial in the Baptist Standard, the newspaper of the Baptist General Convention of Texas.  It's signed by Marv Knox, the editor.

Gov. Rick Perry should place a moratorium on executions, and the next session of the Texas Legislature should vote to abolish the death penalty.

Reasoned opposition to capital punishment is rising:

• No reliable research supports the claim that capital punishment deters murder, according to an analysis of dozens of studies conducted across 36 years.

"Fundamental flaws in the research we reviewed make it of no use in answering the question of whether the death penalty affects homicide rates," Daniel Nagin, a Carnegie Mellon University professor who headed up the review for the National Research Council, told USA Today.

• National support for the death penalty has decreased to 61 percent, the lowest level in four decades, a Gallup poll showed.

And given a choice between capital punishment and life without parole, less than a majority of respondents favor execution, a similar survey indicated.

• Seventeen states have overturned the death penalty. Connecticut abolished the practice last month. Illinois, where the Innocence Project proved numerous false convictions, got rid of it last year. California will consider a referendum this fall.

• Tepid implementation of the death penalty seems to reveal a growing distaste for the practice.

And:

Eighth, it's inconceivable Jesus would execute a criminal. As Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy says: "In the New Testament, the one place where Jesus talks about the death penalty, he says, 'Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.' When I've reflected on the death penalty, the reality is I frequently ponder that passage."

Related posts are in the abolition, editorial, and religion category indexes.

The Myth of Deterrence

That's the title of a New York Times editorial.  It appeared in the Saturday edition.

One of the most frequently made claims about the death penalty is that it deters potential murderers. That was the claim when the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976. It is the claim today after a revival of research about the topic in the last decade.

But a distinguished committee of scholars working for the National Research Council has now reached the striking and convincing conclusion that all of the research about deterrence and the death penalty done in the past generation, including by some first-rank scholars at the most prestigious universities, should be ignored.

The committee found that the research “is not informative about whether capital punishment increases, decreases, or has no effect on homicide rates.” No study looks at what really matters, by comparing the deterrent effects of capital punishment with other penalties, like life without parole. A lot of the research assumes that “potential murderers respond to the objective risk of execution,” but only one in six of the people sentenced to death in the last 35 years have been executed and no study properly took that diminished risk into account.

And:

On Wednesday when Connecticut’s governor, Dannel Malloy, signed the state’s new law abolishing the death penalty, these problems were on his mind. As a former supporter of capital punishment, he said that he “came to believe that doing away with the death penalty was the only way to ensure it would not be unfairly imposed.”

The 33 states that retain the death penalty should follow that lead.

Earlier coverage of the National Research Council deterrence study and Connecticut repeal begins at the links.

Shifts Detected in Support for Death Penalty

That's the title of Kevin Jounson's report in USA Today, this morning.  Here's the beginning.

The campaign to abolish the death penalty has been freshly invigorated this month in a series of actions that supporters say represents increasing evidence that America may be losing its taste for capital punishment.

As early as this week, Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy, a Democrat, is poised to sign a bill repealing the death penalty in that state. A separate proposal has qualified for the November ballot in California that would shut down the largest death row in the country and convert inmates' sentences to life without parole.

Academics, too, have recently taken indirect aim: The National Research Council concluded last week that there have been no reliable studies to show that capital punishment is a deterrent to homicide.

That study, which does not take a position on capital punishment, follows a Gallup Poll last fall found support for the death penalty had slipped to 61% nationally, the lowest level in 39 years.

Even in Texas, which has long projected the harshest face of the U.S. criminal justice system, there has been a marked shift. Last year, the state's 13 executions marked the lowest number in 15 years. And this year, the state — the perennial national leader in executions — is scheduled to carry out 10.

Capital punishment proponents say the general decline in death sentences and executions in recent years is merely a reflection of the sustained drop in violent crime, but some lawmakers and legal analysts say the numbers underscore a growing wariness of wrongful convictions.

In Texas, Dallas County alone has uncovered 30 wrongful convictions since 2001, the most of any county in the country. Former Texas governor Mark White, a Democrat, said he continues to support the death penalty "only in a select number of cases," yet he says he believes that a "national reassessment" is now warranted given the stream of recent exonerations.

"I have been a proponent of the death penalty, but convicting people who didn't commit the crime has to stop," White said.

More on the National Research Council deterrence study at the link.

Current Research Not Sufficient to Assess Deterrent Effect of the Death Penalty

That's the title of a news release issued by the National Research Council announcing a major study capital punishment and deterrence.  Here's the full text of the news release:

Research to date on the effect of capital punishment on homicide rates is not useful in determining whether the death penalty increases, decreases, or has no effect on these rates, says a new report from the National Research Council.  The committee that wrote the report evaluated studies conducted since a four-year moratorium on the death penalty was lifted in 1976, and it found that the studies do not provide evidence for or against the proposition that the death penalty affects homicide rates.  These studies should not be used to inform judgments about the effect of the death penalty on homicide, and should not serve as a basis for policy decisions about capital punishment, the committee said.

The lack of evidence about the deterrent effect of capital punishment -- whether it is positive, negative, or zero -- should not be construed as favoring one argument over another, the report stresses.  "Fundamental flaws in the research we reviewed make it of no use in answering the question of whether the death penalty affects homicide rates," said Daniel S. Nagin, Teresa and H. John Heinz III University Professor of Public Policy and Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, and chair of the committee that wrote the report. "We recognize that this conclusion may be controversial to some, but no one is well-served by unsupportable claims about the effect of the death penalty, regardless of whether the claim is that the death penalty deters homicides, has no effect on homicide rates or actually increases homicides."

The key question, the report says, is whether capital punishment is less or more effective as a deterrent than alternative punishments, such as a life sentence without the possibility of parole.  Yet none of the research that has been done accounted for the possible effect of noncapital punishments on homicide rates.

The committee also found that studies made implausible or unsupported assumptions about potential murderers' perceptions of and response to capital punishment.  Many studies did not address how perceptions are formed and simply inferred that potential murderers respond to the objective risk of execution. This inference ignores the fact that determining the objective risk poses great complexities even for a well-informed researcher, let alone a potential murderer.  For instance, only 15 percent of people who have been sentenced to death since 1976 have actually been executed, and a large fraction of death sentences are reversed.  Furthermore, estimates of the deterrent effect of the death penalty were based on unfounded assumptions, for example, that the effect of capital punishment is the same across all the states and over time.  There is no evidence to support such suppositions.

These intrinsic shortcomings severely limit what can be learned from the existing research, the report says.  The committee recommended next steps for research that include collecting data that consider both capital and noncapital punishments for murder, conducting studies on how potential murderers perceive a range of punishments in homicide cases, and using statistical methods based on more credible assumptions about the effect of capital punishment on homicide rates.

The ultimate success of the research may depend on the specific questions being addressed, the report adds.  Questions of interest include if and how the legal status or intensity of use of the death penalty affects homicide rates or whether executions affect these Rrates in the short term.  The report acknowledged that new data and knowledge may not come quickly or easily, but such research may help to provide insight into the crime prevention effects of noncapital punishment that could be useful for future policy decisions.

The committee was not asked and did not investigate the moral arguments for or against capital punishment, the empirical evidence on whether capital punishment is administered in a nondiscriminatory and consistent fashion, or the cost of its administration.

The study was sponsored by Tides Foundation, the Proteus Action League, and the National Institute of Justice.  The National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council make up the National Academies.  They are private, nonprofit institutions that provide science, technology, and health policy advice under a congressional charter.  The Research Council is the principal operating agency of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.

The members of the NRC review committee are listed on the release, as well as other information.

Prepublication information for Deterrence and the Death Penalty is also available.

Here'a roundup of the initial news coverage:

"Report: Deterrent effect of death penalty unclear," is the AP filing.  It's also available from ABC News and CBS News.

A new report says there is no reliable research on whether the death penalty has any effect on the murder rate, more than 35 years since the Supreme Court allowed the resumption of executions in the United States.

The National Research Council report says all the studies on the possible deterrent effect of the death penalty suffer from fundamental flaws. The report identifies problems that include not taking account of the effects of alternatives to death sentences or insufficiently weighing how killers assess the risk of execution.

The authors of the new report say they are disappointed to reach the same conclusion as a 1978 study. They say their evaluation of the existing research does not favor either side in the long-running debate about deterrence and the death penalty.

"Does the Death Penalty Deter Crime? Studies are Inconclusive," at National Journal.

We still don’t know enough about whether the death penalty works to deter crime, and policymakers should ignore research that claims to say whether it does, the National Academy of Sciences said on Wednesday.

A panel of experts appointed by the independent, nonprofit academy reviewed more than 30 years of research done since the 1976 Supreme Court decision that reinstated the death penalty as constitutional.

“The studies have reached widely varying, even contradictory, conclusions. Some studies conclude that executions save large numbers of lives; others conclude that executions actually increase homicides; and still others conclude that executions have no effect on homicide rate,” according to the academy panel, chaired by Daniel Nagin, an expert in criminology and statistics at Carnegie Mellon University.

And:

The report turns up some interesting facts – for instance, only 15 percent of people who have been sentenced to death since 1976 have actually been executed.

"NRC: Death penalty effect research 'fundamentally flawed'," by Dan Vergano at USA Today.

Does the death penalty deter murderers? Criminology offers no answers, despite more than three decades of research, concludes an expert panel, reviewing studies of the deterrence effects of capital punishment.

In 1976, the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty as the law of the land. Since then, 1,234 people have been executed in U.S. prisons, where 35 states apply the death penalty.

So, does it help lower the homicide rate? Who knows. Research looking into links between capital punishment and murder rates is "fundamentally flawed," concludes a National Research Council panel led by criminologist Daniel Nagin of Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

"One major deficiency in all the existing studies is that none specify the non-capital sanction components of the sanction regime for the punishment of homicide," says the panel's just-released report, such as life imprisonment. As well, "incomplete or implausible models of potential murderers' perceptions," confound the studies, making them suspect.

"We recognize this conclusion will be controversial to some, but nobody is well served by unfounded claims about the death penalty," Nagin said, in a telephone briefing for reporters. "Nothing is known about how potential murderers actually perceive their risk of punishment."

Related posts are in the deterrence category index.

A View From Colorado

"The death penalty and the company we keep," is the title of Englewood Courier View columnist Norma Engelberg's latest. 

Some call the death penalty a crime deterrent, but statistics don’t bear this out.

According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s 2010 Unified Crime Report, the South accounts for 80 percent of executions and had the highest murder rate. The North, which has an execution rate of under 1 percent, had the lowest murder rate.

In “Death penalty not efficient,” an October 2009 article in the Dayton Daily News, Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl is quoted as saying, “If it’s deterrence, it doesn’t seem to get the job done at all. If it’s justice, that’s another question.”

Other police chiefs interviewed for the article said the death penalty doesn’t deter murder because most murders are impulsive acts, and those that aren’t are planned by people who don’t think they’ll be caught.

And:

When it comes to countries that permit the death penalty, the United States keeps company with such developed countries as Japan, Taiwan and Singapore but also with the likes of Iran, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Somalia and other hotbeds of social injustice. Are these examples of the company we want to keep? Not likely.

Related posts are in the column index.

The Illinois Repeal

"Abolishing death penalty was right choice for state," is an OpEd by Charles W. Hoffman for the Chicago Sun-Times.  It appeared in the Sunday edition.  He's an assistant defender in the Office of the Illinois State Appellate Defender, who has argued death penalty appeals before the Illinois Supreme Court.

One year ago this Friday, Gov. Pat Quinn signed legislation abolishing the death penalty in Illinois.

The rightness of that decision is more clear than ever. Violent crime rates have not climbed. The public is no less safe. And the pursuit of justice has been served, not undermined.

Although hundreds of convicted murderers had been sent to Death Row since Illinois reinstated capital punishment in 1977, only 12 men had been executed in the 34 years the death penalty law was on the books. Yet during that same period, 20 innocent men were convicted of murder and sentenced to death, only to be exonerated after spending decades in prison facing execution for crimes they didn’t commit.

The last execution in Illinois took place in 1999, one year before former Gov. George Ryan declared a moratorium on the death penalty, as the only way to avoid what he termed “the ultimate nightmare” of the state wrongfully executing an innocent person. That moratorium remained in effect until capital punishment finally, and officially, ended last year.

Death penalty proponents had long argued that capital punishment was necessary to deter murders. But no evidence ever supported such an argument. In fact, in the year since abolition, the Chicago Police Department reports that the murder rate in the city remains at a 40-year low.

And:

Our system of capital punishment was abolished because it was broken beyond repair, infected with racism and inherently arbitrary and prone to mistakes. There is no doubt we’re better off without the death penalty, both morally and fiscally.

The first anniversary of the abolition of that barbaric practice in Illinois is a joyous, and yet somber, occasion, which gives us all the opportunity to reflect on the profound fact that we, as a sovereign state, no longer kill people to show that killing people is wrong.

Coverage of Illinois' repeal of capital punishment begins at the link; coverage of the costly last Illinois capital prosecution is also available.  Related posts are in the abolition and OpEd indexes.

The Latest News From Illinois

Today's Chicago Sun-Times carries the OpEd, "The case against capital punishment."  It's by Thomas R. Sullivan, Chairman of Illinois Capital Punishment Reform Study Commission.  He's a former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.

During the past 10, much of my time and energy has been devoted to studying our capital punishment system.

As co-chairman of the Governor’s Commission on Capital Punishment (2000-2002), I participated in heart-rending interviews of family members of murder victims and heard moving statements by men who were convicted, sentenced to death and imprisoned for murders they did not commit.

As chairman of the General Assembly’s Capital Punishment Reform Study Committee from 2003 to 2010, I participated in four public hearings, during which we heard the views of many of our citizens about the death penalty. We spoke at length with police and sheriff personnel, prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges. Members of both groups had great sympathy for those who lost a family member as a result of a murder. We sympathized with the men (and their family members) who had been wrongfully convicted of murders and who spent years behind bars.

As a result of these experiences, I have come to the firm conclusion that the death penalty system is extremely expensive, does not deter crime or serve any valid purpose and cannot be reformed to prevent more mistaken death sentences.

And:

So far as I am able to determine, there is no real evidence to support the theory that capital punishment deters crime. Consider this: Following a moratorium on executions in 2000 — and the commutation of more than 160 death sentences to life without parole in 2003 — the Illinois murder rate has declined. Does it follow that commuting death sentences and prohibiting executions deters murder?

An ever-growing number of states do not have the death penalty. No member of the European Union may have it. We can do just fine without capital punishment.

The death penalty diverts our attention and money from the real problems in our society that lead to crime, for example, poverty, unemployment, housing, education and health issues. The Reform Committee recommended that part of the money now spent on capital cases be made available to the families of crime victims. Rather than spending millions to support state killings, would it not be wiser to use the funds to assist crime victims?

The General Assembly was wise and courageous to pass legislation abolishing the death penalty. I respectfully urge Gov. Quinn to sign it.

The Belleville News-Democrat reports, "Death penalty advocates, foes waiting on Quinn: 'Why ... keep an evil person here?'"  It's by Beth Hundsdorfer.

First, there were the reforms, then a blanket commutation of all death row inmates by former Gov. George Ryan who then imposed a moratorium on executions that has stayed in place since 2000.

Earlier this month, Illinois lawmakers did something even proponents of the death penalty and reformers didn't expect. They passed a bill abolishing the death penalty. The bill is on Gov. Pat Quinn's desk awaiting his signature.

Advocates on both sides of the issue are encouraging phone calls and letters to the governor to sway his decision, but the pen still remains on Quinn's desk. Quinn has said he will "follow my conscience" on the issue.

Earlier coverage from Illinois begins at the link.

Support Is Waning for Death Penalty

That's the title of an OpEd in today's Richmond Times-Dispatch written by two noted conservatives, Richard  Viguerie and Brent Bozell.  LINK

We lifelong conservatives and Tea Party supporters recently urged the death sentence for Teresa Lewis in Virginia be commuted to life in prison without parole instead.

We are among a growing number of conservatives who have questions and reservations about the death penalty, believe it is no longer a necessary form of punishment based on either Lockean or biblical principles, or oppose it outright.

Around the country death sentences are dropping, and support for the death penalty is waning. This trend is not limited to bleeding-heart liberals and criminal coddlers.

We urge our fellow conservatives to at least consider some issues when contemplating the death penalty.

The Old Testament required the death penalty for certain sins and a litany of offenses. In John 8 of the New Testament, the Pharisees confronted Jesus about a woman ready to be stoned for adultery. Jesus, sensing a trap they laid on a conflict between the Old Testament and Roman law, said: Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.

We believe John 8 of the New Testament shows that Jesus did not consider the death penalty mandatory punishment for sins, and certainly not unless the process complied with God's law. Deuteronomy 17:6 requires more than one witness to convict.

We also believe conservative Lockean principles do not compel the death penalty.

John Locke's Second Treatise on Government offers a justification of the State's taking the life of someone who is guilty of a heinous crime. Locke, on whose principles conservatism is built, believed the death penalty was a justifiable punishment for two reasons: protecting society (self-preservation) and deterrence.

And:

We now, however, have maximum security prisons that were incapable of being built in Locke's time. Society may protect itself without putting a human to death as it would a wild animal. Since we believe each person has a soul, and is capable of achieving salvation, life in prison is now an alternative to the death penalty.

Under Locke's other reason, deterrence, punishment should be severe enough to discourage criminal acts. We certainly agree. However, some data show the death penalty does not act as deterrence.

In fact, the data seem to indicate murder and other heinous crimes may be lower in jurisdictions that do not have the death penalty. That's not proof, of course, but we believe death penalty proponents bear the burden of proof that the ultimate punishment is in fact a deterrence.

From our conservative perspective, there are other reasons we oppose the death penalty. It is an expensive government program with the power to kill people. Conservatives don't trust the government is always capable, competent, or fair with far lighter tasks.

In a news article by Frank Green and Reed Williams, the Times-Dispatch reports, "Many factors figure in death-penalty cases."

A smiling Sam McCroskey was led from Prince Edward County Circuit Court last month after a plea deal won for him a life sentence instead of execution for bludgeoning four people to death -- three while they slept.

Three days later, Teresa Lewis, a Pittsylvania County grandmother, was executed by injection for a double murder-for-hire in which she did not pull the trigger.

The different outcomes were the latest to confound and upset Virginians who support or oppose the death penalty.

Experts say many factors, not all of them apparent, figure in death cases, including the sentiments of jurors in the 120 jurisdictions that elect commonwealth's attorneys, the wishes of the victims' families, the strength of evidence, and the abilities of the prosecutor and defense lawyers.

From the initial decision by a prosecutor to seek the ultimate sanction to the 11th-hour call by a governor on whether to intervene, discretion plays a huge role.

And:

Even geography is a factor. A capital murder on one side of a county or city line can result in a death sentence and, on the other, life in prison.

In 2001, the General Assembly's Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission studied 215 capital punishment-eligible cases in Virginia from 1995 to 1999.

In that study, suburban prosecutors sought the death penalty in 45 percent of the cases, while city prosecutors sought execution in 16 percent. In rural areas, the death penalty was sought in 34 percent of the cases.

Howard said it is not surprising that in a federal system of government, some states have the death penalty and some do not.

"But it comes as a little more of a jolt when you find that statistically, the prosecuting decision to ask for the death penalty varies quite substantially from one county or one city from another within a state," he said.

"I'm not sure that makes it unconstitutional, but it adds one more, if you like, arbitrary element to the mix -- the same taking of life in two different places but quite disparate decisions."

The quote above is from A.E. Dick Howard, a University of Virginia law professor and constitutional scholar.

 

From New Hampshire

"Let's take a close look at the upcoming report on New Hampshire's death penalty," is the title of an editorial in today's Keene Sentinel.

Debates over the death penalty are sometimes governed by simple personal opinion. Some people approve of it. Some people do not. The reasons may be moral, ethical, religious, practical or instinctive. “I believe the death penalty is right in some cases,” said a Keene High School student last week, speaking at a hearing in Keene held by the New Hampshire Commission to Study the Death Penalty. Others had a different view. “The best possible outcome for me would be for there to be no more death,” said a woman whose daughter was murdered in Henniker.

Such contrasting feelings help explain why the Legislature has voted several times to abolish the death penalty in New Hampshire, and why former governor Jeanne Shaheen vetoed a repeal that passed, and why Governor John Lynch threatened to veto any others that did pass.

And:

Another question is whether the death penalty has any effect on murder rates, positive or negative. Is it a deterrent, reducing the potential for future crimes, or does state-sanctioned killing cheapen the value of life? An FBI report, issued last week, lays out the chicken-and-egg conundrum. The lowest murder rate in the country is in the Northeast, where executions are exceptionally rare (the last one in New Hampshire was in 1939), and the highest murder rate is in the South, where executions are commonplace. Do murder rates drive execution rates, or is it the other way around?

Then there is the expense of capital punishment, when compared to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Kelly Ayotte, a former New Hampshire attorney general, has put on a television commercial in her U.S. Senate campaign boasting that she “fought and won the death penalty” for a cop killer in Manchester. However, when we asked her during a visit to The Sentinel what it will eventually cost to put that man to death, as opposed to locking him up for life, Ayotte claimed she didn’t know. She wouldn’t even estimate, although she did say that before she left office she had asked for and received $400,000 from the Legislature as a down payment on the current case. A study by the state of Kansas a few years ago concluded that the median death-penalty case there costs $1.26 million and that death-penalty cases are 70 percent more expensive than murder cases that do not involve the death penalty. A 2008 study in California found that capital punishment cases cost $90,000 more per year than sentencing people to life without parole. And death penalty cases can take many years to resolve.

Earlier coverage begins with this post.

Opinion Roundup

"Death penalty too costly, doesn’t deter murderers," is the editorial in Connecticut's Norwich Bulletin.

There were 135 murders committed in Connecticut in 2006, the highest amount reported since 1998, which also had 135 murders.

But the 2006 figure is the more important one. That was the year after the state executed serial killer Michael Ross. His execution apparently did little to deter others from taking lives.

In fact, the state has recorded more murders in the four years after Ross’ execution than in the four years leading up to it. From 2001 through 2004, 411 murders were committed compared to 478 from 2006 through 2009.

Of the 10 inmates now on Connecticut’s death row, three were sentenced to death after Ross’ execution — Leslie Campbell III and Russell Peeler, both in 2007, and Lazale Ashby in 2008.
Connecticut’s death penalty is not a deterrent to murder. It hasn’t stopped the violence.

Not everyone convicted of murder is sentenced to death. The vast majority of those who are convicted end up serving long sentences, some life sentences with no chance of parole. And those who are sentenced to death spend decades on death row because of the law’s endless series of appeals available to them. The legal costs of those appeals is staggering; the pain and suffering they bring to victims’ families is immeasurable.

It’s time Connecticut joined other states in repealing the death penalty.

Last week marked the fifth anniversary of Ross’ execution, the first state-sponsored execution in Connecticut in 45 years. Ross admitted killing eight women, six in New London and Windham counties and two others in New York. He served 18 years on death row after his convictions, and was only executed due to his own efforts to have the sentence carried out.

And:

We agree with the current crop of gubernatorial candidates — Democrats and Republicans — that the repeal of the state’s death penalty is not a top priority in this year’s election or for the next administration and Legislature. Creating jobs and addressing the state’s fiscal policies are the priority and should be.

But it is an issue in this year’s campaign. It is expected the Legislature will again next year move to adopt legislation calling for its repeal.

And it is the one issue in this campaign that each of the gubernatorial candidates has been clear about in regards to where they stand.

The five Republicans — Lt. Gov. Michael Fedele, Tom Foley, Oz Griebel, Larry DeNardis and Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton — do not favor the repeal of the law and have said they would veto any attempt to so.

The two Democrats — Ned Lamont and Dan Malloy — agree they would sign the legislation to repeal the law if such a measure was sent to their desk

Saturday's Salt Lake Tribune carried the OpEd, "Capital punishment: The ugly truth," by Erin Mcguire.

On April 23, death row inmate Ronnie Gardner's decision to be executed by firing squad was accepted by state court Judge Robin Reese. As the first capital punishment execution in Utah since 1999, it has once more rekindled a decades-old debate: Should Utah remain a death penalty state?

Capital punishment continues to be used for a few reasons: It's believed to be a major crime deterrent and cheaper than life imprisonment in already overcrowded prisons, and the executions can be done humanely through lethal injection. However, based on recent findings, none of these reasons are valid.

In 2007, the U.S. Department of Justice made its annual report of crime rates across the country, including cities with the highest population. Cities in each of the 15 non-death-penalty states consistently had lower crime rates than cities within the 35 states that did have the death penalty. An example being New York City, without the death penalty, which had a total of 613 violent crimes compared to Philadelphia, which does have the death penalty and had a total of 1,475 violent crimes.

Similar reports done each year by the Federal Bureau of Investigation show that non-death-penalty states have had noticeably lower crime rates since 1991.

And:

Capital punishment, stripped of these three justifications, is only a means to immediate retribution. However, death-row inmates can be punished just as strictly through life without parole sentences that avoid aren't unconstitutional, expensive or ineffective. More than 90 countries across the globe have abolished the death penalty, including the entirety of Western Europe, and 15 states have followed their example. It may be time for Utah to do the same.

"Md. executions waste families' time and taxpayers' money," by Melanie Share appears in today's Washington Post Letters.  She is a board member of Maryland Citizens Against State Executions. 

Polling from 2007 shows that Marylanders are ready to get rid of the death penalty and replace it with a maximum punishment of life in prison without the possibility of parole. And yet former governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. is trying to make an issue out of the death penalty ["Ehrlich takes issue with death penalty delays," Metro, May 8].

A 30-year low in violent crime in Maryland, including a 12 percent drop in homicides, comes alongside a nearly four-year moratorium on executions, due to the Court of Appeals having tossed out the state's execution method. The reality is that our ineffective death penalty wastes money that could be better spent on effective public safety efforts.

There is earlier coverage from Connecticut, Maryland, and Utah at the links.

From Arizona

Dan Peitzmeyer writes the OpEd, "Perpetuating the death penalty just isn't cost-effective," for today's Arizona Republic.  He's vice president of the Arizona Death Penalty Forum.

In tight economic times, efforts must be taken to save money. Every cost study in the U.S. shows that the death penalty is more expensive than life in prison, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based non-profit that opposes the death penalty. The center reported ending the financially wasteful death penalty would save "hundreds of millions."

Capital case costs spiral from the onset. Every stage, from jury selection through the appeals process, consumes more time and money than a typical criminal case.

Arizona convicts sit on death row years awaiting execution. Viva Leroy Nash lived on death row 26 years before dying of natural causes. "Death row" itself is costly, requiring more security. The Arizona Department of Corrections does not provide figures on the costs of maintaining an inmate on death row, but California spends an additional $90,000 per year per death-row inmate. Arizona pay scales are less, but if it's $60,000, that's nearly $8 million annually.

Precise national figures don't exist. However, a recent Urban Institute study in Maryland estimated the additional cost of a capital trial was $1.9 million. Why does the death penalty cost so much? The easy answer is because "death is different."

And:

Further, many do not consider the death penalty an effective deterrent. Capital-crime rates are lower in states with no death penalty than in death penalty states. Quoting Janet Woodford, former warden of San Quentin: "The death penalty should be replaced with life without parole. I didn't reach that conclusion because I'm soft on crime." Norm Stamper, retired Seattle chief of police, said: "The death penalty is inefficient and extravagantly expensive."

Earlier coverage from Arizona is here; related posts are in the cost and OpEd indexes.

New Hampshire Commission Hears Deterrence Testimony

"On death penalty, researchers differ with the police," is the title of Annmarie Timmins' report in the Saturday edition of the Concord Monitor.

There may be reasons for New Hampshire to keep the death penalty, but statistics show deterrence shouldn't be one of them, a criminologist testified yesterday before a legislative group weighing the future of capital punishment here.

"Our research doesn't mean that punishing homicide offenders is a bad idea," said Tom Kovandzic of the University of Texas. "What we are saying is that increasing punishment by having the death penalty doesn't decrease the number of homicides."

Another statistician from Dartmouth College agreed. Police officers, however, did not.

"I think we need to send a message that we are willing to take extreme action for an extreme act," said Belknap County Sheriff Craig Wiggin, representing the state's 10 sheriffs. "I don't know if we will truly ever know if (having the death penalty) is a deterrent factor. But I think it's common sense that it must be for some."

Brad Whitney, a commission member whose father, Robert Whitney of Penacook, was killed in 2001, agreed. How, Whitney asked, do you count the number of capital murders that weren't committed because a criminal was deterred by fear of execution?

Lawmakers created the 20-member death penalty study commission last year after the state tried two death penalty cases, winning a death sentence in one and life without parole in the other. The commission has until later this year to assess several difficult questions, including whether the life without parole is a suitable option; if the state's death penalty law covers the appropriate crimes; and whether it is applied arbitrarily.

Yesterday, the commission's focus was deterrence. Groups against the death penalty, including the New Hampshire Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and the New Hampshire Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, paid the expenses of some who testified.

John Lamperti, a retired math professor from Dartmouth College, has reviewed the many statistical studies of the death penalty. He said most of those studies have found no evidence the death penalty deterred crime. Nor did those studies show that the existence of death penalty laws make police officers and prison guards safer, Lamperti said.

And:

Kovandzic did his own study to reach his conclusion that capital punishment does not deter capital crime. He did so, he said, because of the range of outcomes from the other studies. Some said the death penalty caused more crime while another said an execution could save 18 other lives.

"Criminals aren't as rational as some of these statisticians assume," he said.

More information is at the New Hampshire Death Penalty Study Commission website.

Earlier coverage from New Hampshire is here; more on the study Kovandzic and UT Dallas researchers, here and here.  Related posts are in the deterrence index.

More From Frank Baumgartner on the North Carolina Death Penalty

Today's Charlotte Observer carries the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill political science professor's OpEd, "In N.C., only 20 percent of condemned are executed."  Here's an extended excerpt from Baumgartner's OpEd:

To the litany of woes facing North Carolina's death penalty system, let us add a new one: 69 percent of those sentenced to death were determined by the courts to have been given excessive sentences. Only 20 percent of those sentenced to death were actually executed.

In this time of debate about costs and the possibility of executing the innocent, it's important to pay attention to the details of how the death penalty is administered. The Department of Correction's Website provides a list of all those sentenced to death in the state since 1977, and what it reveals is quite shocking. A study of the information suggests that, at a minimum, the death penalty is surprisingly inefficient. The vast bulk of those sentenced to death are, after scrutiny by the courts, later found not to have deserved the sentence.

Look at the numbers. From 1977 through the end of 2009, 388 individuals were sentenced to death, most for taking someone's life.

Five were later completely cleared of the charges for which they were condemned. Ed Chapman, Levon Jones and Johnathan Hoffman are just three recent examples. These men served a combined 40 years on death row for crimes they did not commit. The larger picture suggests that whatever the rate of actual innocence may be, the reliability of the death penalty system is surprisingly low.

What has happened to the 388 initially sentenced to die?

Of them, 158 remain on death row. Twelve are in jail pending a new trial, but are no longer on death row. Forty three have been executed. Six have committed suicide, and 19 others died of natural causes. The vast majority received a new trial based on appellate decisions that their original trial was seriously flawed.

Here is the shocking part: At subsequent trials, the vast majority were sentenced to a punishment less than death: 130 to life, 10 to a sentence less than that, and five were found not guilty altogether. Another five saw their sentence commuted by the governor to life without parole. In all, a full 69 percent of those entering death row eventually are sentenced to a lower sentence, generally life in prison.

What does this mean? For one, it suggests that our state is about like others. Columbia Law Professor James Leibman and colleagues reviewed thousands of cases in 2000 in all death-penalty states and found a reversal rate of 68 percent.

And:

Finally, recent studies echo what other studies have found for years: The death penalty does not serve as a deterrent to future violent crime. The numbers I've pointed to may help explain it: Death sentences are imposed in a very small percentage of homicides but carried out in even fewer. This cannot possibly provide much deterrent value.

Recent attention to questions of innocence has caused a national pause concerning the death penalty. The exonerations of 139 individuals nationally have shocked the nation. We can all be pleased their innocence was demonstrated in time to avoid their wrongful execution.

But the problems with the death penalty system aren't limited to questions of innocence. With a 69 percent chance that any death sentence will be reversed, we should seriously question why we persist in maintaining a system that is costing us so much, but producing so many mistakes each year.

An earlier OpEd on North Carolina's death penalty by Frank Baumgartner is noted here.

Baumgartner is professor of political science at UNC Chapel Hill and co-author of The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence.  More on the book, here.  You can order it from Amazon.

Deterrence Studies at Odds

Both studies have received earlier news coverage, noted here.  I believe that the most accurate and succinct comment on the topic comes from Cass Sunstein and Justin Wolfers in their 2008 Washington Post OpEd, "A Death Penalty Puzzle," noted here:

In short, the best reading of the accumulated data is that they do not establish a deterrent effect of the death penalty.

AP's Michael Graczyk writes, "Study says Texas death penalty a deterrent," via the Houston Chronicle.

As many as 60 people may be alive today in Texas because two dozen convicted killers were executed last year in the nation's most active capital punishment state, according to a study of death penalty deterrence by researchers from Sam Houston State University and Duke University.

A review of executions and homicides in Texas by criminologist Raymond Teske at Sam Houston in Huntsville and Duke sociologists Kenneth Land and Hui Zheng concludes a monthly decline of between 0.5 to 2.5 homicides in Texas follows each execution.

“Evidence exists of modest, short-term reductions in the numbers of homicides in Texas in the month of or after executions,” the study published in a recent issue of Criminology, a journal of the American Society of Criminology, said.

The study adds to decades of academic dissection of the death penalty and deterrence. Results over the years vary from capital punishment saving more lives than suggested in this study to no conclusive effect.

This study, however, is the first to focus on monthly data in Texas, where researchers said the number of executions — 447 since capital punishment resumed in 1982 — is statistically significant enough “to make possible relatively stable estimates of the homicide response to executions.” A national deterrent effect can't be determined because “most states ... have not engaged in a sufficient level or frequency of executions per year,” they said.

Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the California-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which supports capital punishment, said the study “would be sufficient by itself to justify the death penalty.”

But Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based organization opposed to capital punishment, said while he was not a statistics expert, “the large number of variables affecting these calculations and the relative rarity of executions make final conclusions about deterrence very suspect.”

The study analyzed data from January 1994 through December 2005, during which 284 lethal injections were carried out in Texas — about one-third of all death sentences carried out in the U.S.

The year 1994 was selected as the starting point because state and federal legislation and court rulings beginning then led to “an orgy of executions in Texas,” the researchers noted.

Of the years studied, four had more than 30 executions, including a record 40 carried out in 2000.

At the Dallas Morning News Death Penalty blog, Michael Landauer writes, "The death penalty deterrence myth."

The good news about historically low murder statistics in Dallas (and all over, really) will prompt some folks to think that means our busy death chamber in Hunstville should get some share of the credit.

Not so, say scientists who study this sort of thing. But before I get into that, just think about what it might mean if the death penalty did deter some murders. In Dallas, that would be especially alarming, given what we know about the death penalty. We know that if your victim is white, you are far more likely to face execution than if your victim is black. But in Dallas, by far, most victims of murder are black (47 percent). So if we actually believe that the death penalty is what is keeping people from killing white people (the victims whose deaths are most commonly avenged by executions) then shame on us. How dare we provide that level of protection only for one race.

Fortunately, there's no science to back up the notion that executions deter any violence among any race. Despite a rash of studies alleging that the death penalty saves anywhere from 6 to 18 lives for every execution earlier this decade -- studies that resulted in splashy play on the front pages of major newspapers -- scientists have been busy debunking those studies ever since. In fact, the latest statistical analysis comes from researchers right here in Dallas at UTD. They say there is absolutely no empirical evidence to support the claim that the death penalty deters violent crime.

Related posts are in the deterrence category index.

The Death Penalty Debate in New Hampshire - Editorials

"Does the death penalty deter?" is the Keene Sentinel editorial.  It appeared in Monday's edition.

A recent legislative effort in Concord indirectly raises the following question: Would Kimberly Cates of Mont Vernon be alive today if, following the murders of Dartmouth professors Half and Susanne Zantop in Hanover in 2001, the state’s death penalty law had been expanded to include killings committed during home invasions?

In fact, no such provision exists; New Hampshire’s relatively narrow capital punishment law doesn’t cover murders during a home raid. But what if it did? Would the assailants in Mont Vernon have behaved differently, knowing that they themselves might die for what they were about to do?

The question gets to deterrence, presumably the principal purpose of the death penalty. And the occasion for asking it now is an attempt, thwarted on House procedural rules last week, to enter a bill that would have added execution for future killings carried out during home invasions.

Delay in debating that proposed bill makes sense. A commission recently started work on a review of capital punishment in the state; it’s wise to see what that study turns up before changing the law in any way. The study group, which is to issue a report 12 months from now, was assembled after the Senate refused to back a death penalty repeal that passed the House under the threat of a gubernatorial veto.

And:

These are all good reasons to pull back on capital punishment — and ultimately to end it. We expect the death penalty study commission will pay those reasons close attention.

Today's Nashua Telegraph carries the editorial, "Political rhetoric reaches a new low."

Just when you thought partisan back-biting could not be more bitter, irrational or offensive, our politicians manage to take it to the next level. The most recent example comes from the The House Republican Alliance, which has politicized the horrific violence in Mont Vernon that left a mother dead and her daughter seriously injured.

The House Rules Committee on Dec. 17 voted to reject the late filing of the Kimberly Cates Capital Murder Law for the 2010 session, with the Democratic majority outvoting the four Republicans on the committee.

And:

As stated in a previous editorial, we share the outrage of the community and understand the motives behind the legislation proposed by Republican state Rep. Bill O’Brien.

But there is no urgency surrounding the bill, since any change in the death penalty could not be applied retroactively in the Mont Vernon case.

Meanwhile a special commission has been appointed to conduct a yearlong analysis of how the death penalty should be applied in New Hampshire, versus life without the possibility of parole. The panel, under the direction of retired Superior Court Chief Justice Walter Murphy, has until Dec. 1, 2010, to issue its report.

Democrats have taken the reasonable position that action on the death penalty should be put on hold until the commission completes its work, which could inform any legislative decision.

When state Rep. Jim Splaine, D-Portsmouth, told The Telegraph that any attempt to alter the death penalty law while the commission is doing its work is pure politics, we characterized that assessment as a bit harsh for lawmakers who were only trying to reflect the outrage of their community.

Apparently, Splaine knows his peers better than we do. The HRA statement is clearly designed to cast Democrats as disinterested in the Cates murder, with statements like, “House Democrats took a walk today on the Kimberly Cates law” and “Let the voters decide whether the House Democrat leaders who make up their party’s delegation on the Rules Committee should be congratulated for dodging this issue.”

The bill can still be considered in the next legislative session, when it will most likely be introduced in both the House and Senate. In the meantime, this attempt to influence voters by exploiting such tragedy is not likely to have the desired effect.

Earlier coverage from New Hampshire begins with this post.

Editorial Roundup

Shortly after midnight, Indiana executed Eric Wrinkles, who had waived his appeals.  Today's Fort Wayne News-Sentinel carries the editorial, 'If punishment doesn't deter, is it still morally acceptable to use it?"

Eric Wrinkles is dead, put to death by the state of Indiana earlier today. Neither Mary Winnecke nor Mae McIntire will be at peace with that death, but for vastly different reasons.

Winnecke’s daughter was one of three people Wrinkles murdered July 21, 1994. She happens to be a Catholic who says she has always opposed the death penalty for religious reasons but that her daughter’s death crystallized her opposition. She expressed the hope that Wrinkles would ask God for forgiveness before he died.

McIntire lost her adopted son and daughter to Wrinkles’ brutality. She hasn’t been able to find the forgiveness that Winnecke did.

“I don’t see why he should live,” she said before the execution. “He claimed he was on drugs and (that) caused it all, but he had been that way all his life.”

Winnecke won’t be happy with the execution because it violates a core principle so strongly held it withstood the worst kind of personal tragedy. McIntire will be disappointed, perhaps bitterly so, because she thinks the execution will bring closure, and it won’t.

If the two closest relatives of the murder victims can be so divided over how the murderer should be treated, how can the rest of us possibly agree on it? Indeed, the death penalty is one of those issues that trouble many Hoosiers greatly, even the ones who have made up their minds.

The best defense of the death penalty is to argue that it is a deterrent that can prevent other horrible murders on down the road. But the way it is administered, it is clearly not a deterrent (except that it does deter the one person it is carried out upon). Delays because of numerous appeals are so long that people who murder at a certain age will die in prison before they are executed. The expense involved is greater than that of life imprisonment.

And so few people who murder actually are sentenced to death. According to the Duneland Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, 4,616 Hoosiers were charged with murder from 1990 through 2,000, and only 14 people are on death row today – well, make that 13. Talk about a crap shoot.

So the question of the day is this: If capital punishment is not a deterrent, is it still morally acceptable to use it given that life in prison without parole is also an available option?

The Evansville Journal & Courier has, "Indiana inmate executed for 1994 triple murder."

The Virginian Pilot asks a similar question in its editorial, "Is an execution worth the price?"

A manager of a state agency has a common-sense solution for saving Virginia a few million dollars in this grim economy: Sentence killers - those found to have committed premeditated murder - to spend the rest of their lives in prison, with no chance ever of getting out.

Doing away with the option of a death sentence makes sense on several levels. It would save the state from having to pay fees associated with lengthy trials and years of appeals. It would end the agony of repeated court hearings for the families of victims. It would eliminate the four perpetually understaffed capital defender's offices, whose attorneys handle appeals automatically generated when people are sentenced to death row.

When prosecutors decide not to pursue a punishment of death, defendants are more likely to plead guilty, The Pilot's Shawn Day reported this week. Even if defendants go to trial, the court costs, borne by taxpayers, are much less expensive, the hearings less likely to be delayed.

At the moment, more than a dozen capital murder cases are under way across Virginia. The fees for the defendants' legal representation during a capital trial - $150 per hour out of court, $200 per hour in court - routinely reach six figures, and that doesn't include other court costs, including the prosecution's.

Given the $3.5 billion gap in the state's budget, David Baugh, who has managed the Richmond-area capital defender's office for 18 months, told Day that Virginia "ought to give serious thought to a moratorium on the death penalty until the budget gets straight."

A moratorium would be a good start. Eliminating the penalty altogether would be better. Besides other valid reasons for ending the practice, including the most compelling - that it would keep the state from killing someone later found to be innocent - getting rid of the penalty would free up money at a time the state is seeing so many needs.

If lawmakers won't listen to the moral arguments for abolishing the death penalty, they should consider the economic benefits.

Related posts are in the cost and deterrence indexes; more editorials, in the editorial category index.

A Conflicting Deterrence Study

The Science blog at USA Today has, "Study: Executions might slightly lower homicide rates," posted by Dan Vergano.

Executions in Texas slightly lower homicide rates there, about five to 10 killings in the year afterwards, suggest criminologists.The executions also may displace homicides to nearby states, however.

"Does the death penalty save lives?," a study led by sociologist Kenneth Land of Duke University in the current Criminology journal, looked at executions in Texas from 1994 to 2005 and subsequent crime.  Criminologists, and Supreme Court cases, have debated the death penalty for at least four decades, the study notes, adding, "estimates of the deterrent effects of executions are highly sensitive to the model," used in the analysis.

In the study, the team looked at Texas, where about one-third of all executions have occurred nationwide since 1973, and where past researchers have disagreed on deterrent effects. Because legal decision led to greatly-increased executions in 1994, the researchers looked at cases starting with that year.

"We conclude that evidence exists of modest, short-term reductions in the numbers of homicides in Texas in the months of or after executions," the study concludes. Based on statistics, about 2.5 fewer murders than would have otherwise took place in Texas in the one to four months after an execution, where the state had 8,511 murders in 2005, according to the FBI. But the analysis statistics suggest the executions also displaced murders to later months and to other states, lowering the deterrent effect of each execution to 0.5 fewer murders in the next year.

Texas execution rates have raised controversy, heightened this year by reports of questionable arson evidence used in a prominent case detailed the year in the New Yorker magazine. Disagreement among criminologists will likely continue over the deterrent effect of executions...

Last week, a study conducted by UT Dallas researchers, noted here, showed no deterrent effect. 

I believe that the most accurate and succinct comment on the topic comes from Cass Sunstein and Justin Wolfers in their 2008 Washington Post OpEd, "A Death Penalty Puzzle," noted here:

In short, the best reading of the accumulated data is that they do not establish a deterrent effect of the death penalty.

Related posts are in the deterrence category index.

Capital Punishment Not Likely A Murder Deterrent: Study

That's the headline at the Crime Report from John Jay College's Center on Media, Crime and Justice.  LINK

Contrary to the common belief that capital punishment deters murderers, a study by Tomislav Kovandzic, Lynne Vieraitis, and Denise Paquette Boots of the University of Texas at Dallas concludes that most offenders do not likely weigh the costs and benefits of crime and are not likely to be deterred by the existence of the death penalty. Many homicides are committed when offenders are under extreme emotional duress and are unlikely to be thinking of the legal sanctions.

The study, in the November 2009 issue of the journal Criminology and Public Policy, edited at Florida State University, says that for the death penalty to serve as a deterrent, the probability of getting caught and punished must be greater than any benefit the offender could achieve from committing the crime.

The web version of the Journal is here. 

Deterrence and executions

• Editorial Introduction
  The impact of the death penalty on murder
  John J. Donohue III
• Research Article
  Does the death penalty save lives? New evidence from state panel data, 1977 to 2006
  Tomislav V. Kovandzic, Lynne M. Vieraitis, Denise Paquette Boots
• Policy Essay
  Can’t tell: Comments on “Does the death penalty save lives?”
  Richard Berk
• Policy Essay
  Don’t scrap the death penalty
  Paul H. Rubin

More on the topic in the deterrence category index.

Rick Casey on Deterrence

The Houston Chronicle columnist's latest is, "A murder mystery by the numbers."

This is a different kind of murder mystery.

For years, social scientists have tried to determine whether the death penalty has a deterrent effect. Put another way, does the death penalty save lives?

In 1967, sociologist Thorsten Sellin found no significant impact when he studied murder rates in adjacent states with differing approaches to capital punishment.

The next year, Nobel Prize economist Gary Becker developed a theory supporting the deterrent value of the death penalty, and eight years later one of his students published a study based on national statistics purporting to show that each execution saved eight lives.

The controversy led to a study commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences that found evidence of deterrence to be unconvincing.

More recent studies have reached conclusions all over the map. A national study in 2005 found “profound uncertainty” on the question and even suggested that executions might slightly increase the murder rate (possibly through a cultural “brutalization”). Another study that year suggested that each execution saves 150 lives.

All these studies are noted in a peer-reviewed article about to come out in Criminology, the journal of the American Society of Criminology. The study was conducted by Duke University Sociologist Kenneth C. Land, Sam Houston State University criminologist Raymond Teske Jr. and one of Land's graduate students, Hui Zheng.

Land is a prominent specialist on research methodology. He earned his doctorate at the University of Texas and chaired Duke's sociology department from 1986 to 1997.

After reviewing earlier studies, these authors came to the conclusion that the death penalty is used too sporadically and inconsistently around the nation for studies on national data to accurately measure its effect on crime.

They decided to focus their study by taking advantage of Texas' gift to social science, what they call “an orgy of executions in Texas beginning in 1994,” during which time the state provided more than a third of the nation's executions.

To measure the impact of executions, the authors looked at two distinct periods.

The first was from 1980 through 1993, when for a variety of legal reasons, executions were relatively infrequent and uncertain. In those years there were about eight executions a year, and about five convicts a year removed from death row for various reasons.

And:

Using sophisticated statistical models, the researchers tested the impact of the larger number of executions.

They found that many earlier studies had vastly overestimated the effect, but the number of murders did go down in the short-term aftermath of executions.

Based on two different statistical models, they found the effect in the months after each execution to be a reduction of between 0.5 to 2.5 homicides.

That may not sound like much, but as the authors note, “even the estimated .5 deterrent per execution yields an estimated reduction in the expected numbers of monthly homicides of 5 to 10 during the subsequent 12 months, which is substantial.”

I'm sure this isn't the last word on the issue. That's no mystery. Here's the mystery:

This study and previous ones show no correlation between the amount of publicity executions receive and their deterrent effect.

“We have no theory on that,” Teske said on Friday. After a few more questions, he said, “I hear your frustration. If I wasn't working with one of the top guys in the nation, my confidence would be shaken.”

One other mystery: The study shows, as other studies have, more impact on the kinds of murders that don't qualify for the death penalty than on those that do.

Related posts and past coverage is in the deterrence category index.

The State of Capital Punishment

A handful of weekend articles examine the current state of capital punishment in the nation.  First, a column by James Cummings.  He's a staff writer at Ohio's Dayton Daily News.  It's titled, "Death penalty is being phased out."  Here's an extended excerpt of this must-read:

There have been 35 people executed in the United States this year, the most recent being Daytonian Marvallous Keene, who died by lethal injection Tuesday, July 21, for the 1992 Christmas season killings of five people here.

In Western Europe, though, there hasn’t been an execution since 1977, according to Franklin Zimring in his 2003 book “The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment.”

While a public debate rages in America over whether capital punishment deters crime, there’s a debate within academic circles over why we stand alone among modern Western civilizations in continuing to execute.

Montgomery County Prosecutor Mathias Heck Jr., who has prosecuted several capital murder cases, said studies saying the death penalty deters crime seem to be balanced by just as many saying the opposite.

“It’s a really difficult question because we cannot know what’s in a perpetrator’s mind just before he steals something, or robs a bank or shoots somebody,” Heck said.

Heck said he knows that some criminals shy away from using guns in crimes because they know being convicted of using a gun automatically adds a few years to a prison sentence. “But whether you can take the logical step that the death penalty is a deterrent, that’s really hard to say,” he said.

So why do Americans continue to execute in the face of such ambiguity?

Zimring theorized that the persistence of capital punishment is related to the belief developed through the history of certain parts of the country that the community has the right to exact justice.

Zimring points out that the states that have carried out the most executions since 1976 tend to be the same states in the South and Southwest where lynchings were most common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Researcher David Garland offers a different theory in his 2005 article “Capital Punishment and American Culture” in the journal Punishment and Society.

Garland believes the United States is following the same path as Western Europe when it comes to capital punishment; we’re just a step or two behind.

Garland said as societies modernize they tend to follow a single pattern. First the range of offenses possibly leading to execution reduces. Next execution by torture disappears followed by the disappearance of public executions and the development of swift, painless forms of death.

Eventually a few people begin speaking out publicly against the death penalty, and public sentiment against the practice grows.

In the next phase, legal safeguards against inappropriate execution grow. What followed in Europe in the latter 20th century were reductions in the use of capital punishment followed by legal abolition.

And:

A Step Back is planned as a recurring theme for this column in which issues in the news will be approached from a variety of social science perspectives. If you have a subject you’d like to see examined through the lens of history, psychology, anthropology, genetics, political science, communication theory or some other discipline, let me know. Also I welcome input from social scientists, ethicists, scholars and others with their own takes on the news.

The next two posts will link to news articles specific to Connecticut and Pennsylvania.

Death Penalty Does Not Deter Murder

That's the title of an OpEd in the Sunday edition of the Contra Costa Times written by Mike Radelet and Werner J. Einstadter.  Radelet is co-author of a recent deterrence study, Einstadter worked in California corrections and is Einstadter is a professor emeritus of criminology and sociology.  LINK

A NEW survey of America's leading criminologists has concluded that the death penalty does not deter homicide any better than long imprisonment. Eighty-seven percent of the experts believe that capital punishment can be abolished without any adverse effect on the murder rate.

Why then is California keeping this expensive but unproductive policy when it is facing in excess of a $26 billion deficit? It is astounding that the state is spending $137 million per year to retain the death penalty and getting virtually nothing in return.

The certainty of a punishment is a more effective deterrent than its severity. In California, nearly 40 percent of all homicides are not solved. If the state is serious about reducing the homicide rate, it is much more constructive to spend tax dollars on apprehending murderers and administering prompt punishment than on executing those who we know will already die in prison.

In recent years, public confidence in the death penalty has been chipped away by DNA exonerations, evidence of massive inequities and racial bias, its failure to give "closure" to victims, and a general sense that the system is too broken to be fixed. Since 1973, 133 people in 26 states have been released from death row because of innocence. Three were in California.

The most important rationale used by friends of the executioner is deterrence. Supporting the death penalty gives politicians an easy way to pretend that they are serious about reducing criminal violence.

However, many studies have shown that murderers do not carefully weigh the costs and benefits of their actions. Anyone who can be deterred from committing murder by the death penalty can also be deterred by the less expensive alternative, life in prison without parole. Because of security requirements, each inmate on death row in California costs about $90,000 per year more than what it costs to incarcerate a prisoner serving life without parole.

Most police officers agree that the death penalty does nothing to deter crime. In a nationwide poll of police chiefs, the death penalty was ranked last in effectiveness among crime-fighting programs behind reducing drug abuse, improving the economy and jobs, hiring more police officers and reducing the availability of guns.

And:

California faces difficult fiscal choices. Ending the death penalty, an enormously expensive punishment that offers nothing for public safety, should be a no-brainer. Doing so would save California $1 billion over the next five years. About $1 billion would go a long way toward rehiring police officers, solving cold cases, making drug treatment available and other programs that reduce crime and make a difference in people's lives.

Earlier coverage of the Radelet & Lacock study begins here; more on the California cost debate, here.

Kansas City Star Calls for Missouri Moratorium

"Moratorium on Missouri executions makes sense," is the title of the Kansas City Star editorial.  It appeared in the Sunday edition. 

Executions in Missouri are on hold — again.

Any delay is to be applauded. The death penalty is expensive and impossible to mete out fairly. It is simply a flawed public policy.

But Missouri is allowing inmate appeals to determine how and when the state administers capital punishment. The on-again, off-again pace of executions is excruciating for family members of both victims and inmates.

Incoming state Supreme Court Chief Justice William Ray Price Jr. said last week the state will likely schedule no execution dates while officials await the outcome of a federal appeal filed on behalf of death row inmate Reginald Clemons.

And:

Last session, the Missouri House took a step toward resolving the uncertainty when it seriously considered a moratorium on executions. Lawmakers stopped short of taking that step. But they voted to create a commission that would review cases to ensure those sentenced to death are guilty and received adequate legal counsel, and to consider possible alternative punishments.

Unfortunately, the Senate didn’t endorse comparable legislation. So the legislature passed up its best opportunity in years to lead the discussion on capital punishment.

The state has a sorry history of handling capital cases. Several inmates have been released from death row after flaws were found in the legal process. Serious questions remain about the fairness of some executions that took place.

A moratorium and a study are the best ways for Missouri to resolve the many troubling issues that have arisen from its application of the death penalty.

Reluctant lawmakers may find some encouragement in a new report in the Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, published by the Northwestern University School of Law.

The report, by University of Colorado-Boulder professor Michael L. Radelet and researcher Traci L. Lacock, notes problems with previous studies that claim death penalty laws deter people from committing murders.

Radelet and Lacock surveyed 76 criminologists who have been cited by peers as leaders in their field. Of those experts, 88 percent said they don’t think the death penalty acts as a deterrent.

Earlier coverage of the Radelet & Lacock study begins here.  More on the lethal injection debate in Missouri is here.

Continued Coverage of Radelet & Lacock Study

Opposing Views carries, "States Without Death Penalty Have Lower Murder Rates," by Amnesty International.

Scientists agree, by an overwhelming majority, that the death penalty has no deterrent effect. They felt the same way over ten years ago, and nothing has changed since then. States without the death penalty continue to have significantly lower murder rates than those that retain capital punishment. And the few recent studies purporting to prove a deterrent effect, though getting heavy play in the media, have failed to impress the larger scientific community, which has exposed them as flawed and inconsistent.

The latest issue of the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology contains a study by a Sociology professor and a graduate student at the University of Colorado-Boulder (Michael Radelet and Traci Lacock), examining the opinions of leading criminology experts on the deterrence effects of the death penalty.

The results reveal that most experts do not believe that the death penalty or the carrying out of executions serve as deterrents to murder, nor do they believe that existing empirical research supports the deterrence theory. In fact, the authors report that 88.2% of respondents do not think that the death penalty deters murder—a level of consensus comparable to the agreement among scientists regarding global climate change. At the same time, only 9.2% of surveyed experts indicated that they believed the death penalty results in a significant drop in murder cases (56.6% completely disagreed with that statement, while 32.9% thought the correlation between capital punishment and lower homicide numbers to be “largely inaccurate”; 1.3% were uncertain).

The study builds upon previous research, published in 1996, in which the opinions of 67 leading experts in the field of criminology were surveyed. The most recent study sent the same questions to a new group of experts (a total of 73), among whom were fellows from the American Society of Criminology, as well as award-winning criminology scholars.

Earlier coverage begins with this post.

More on the Radelet & Lacock Deterrence Study

Virginia Blogger Tamar Abrams has, "Experts Agree: Death Penalty Not a Deterrent," fresh at Huffington Post.

Like many Americans, I have long had an uneasy sense of the death penalty in this country. In order to fully support it, you have to have complete faith in our justice system and in the value of deterrence. Recently the latter has been strongly challenged: A new study shows that 88% of the country's top criminologists do not believe the death penalty acts as a deterrent to homicide. The study was published earlier this week in Northwestern University School of Law's Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology authored by Professor Michael Radelet, Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and Traci Lacock, an attorney and Sociology grad student in Boulder.

"Do Executions Lower Homicide Rates? The Views of Leading Criminologists," relied on questionnaires completed by the most pre-eminent criminologists in the country. Fully 75% of them agree that "debates about the death penalty distract Congress and state legislatures from focusing on real solutions to crime problems." Respondents were not asked for their personal opinions about the wisdom of the death penalty, but instead to answer the questions only on the basis of their understanding of the empirical research.

And, one of Tamar's links brings you back to StandDown:

A number of states are currently considering repealing the death penalty. Just this week, former CA Attorney General John Van de Kamp called for an end to California's death penalty because it would save $1 billion over five years at a time when the state is near bankruptcy. Only three countries in the world -- China, Iran and Saudi Arabia -- execute more prisoners than the U.S. and more than 128 nations have abolished the death penalty.

This latest study validates the need for the U.S. to end a practice that harkens back to the days of the Wild West. If executions hold no value to deter other crimes and if we can't avoid the risk of executing the innocent and if they are overwhelmingly burdening state budgets, why not relegate them to history? To paraphrase an old tune, "Executions? What are they any good for? Absolutely nothing."

Earlier coverage begins here.

Loyal readers know that I do not believe data have shown any deterrent effect attributable to capital punishment.  I've also been troubled by the anecdotal evidence.  There is a timely story from Nevada's Reno Review-Journal, "Former officer's death sentence upheld."

A former police officer's death sentence for murdering an elementary school teacher in Reno and a casino worker in Sparks was upheld Wednesday by the Nevada Supreme Court.

As I've noted previously , if there is any deterrent effect, it seems that it would apply to law enforcement personnel and attorneys.  After all, they are the people most informed as to what constitutes a capital crime in their state.  And yet, there is considerable anecdotal evidence that the death penalty has not deterred crooked cops and bad barristers.  I'll gladly extend the presumption of innocence in the recent case of the "LAPD detective charged with capital murder."

Los Angeles County prosecutors Monday [June 8] charged a Los Angeles Police Department detective with premeditated murder in case that dates back to 1986.

Prosecutors said they had not decided whether to seek the death penalty for Stephanie Ilene Lazarus, 49, but execution is a possibility if Lazarus is convicted of killing her former boyfriend's wife, Sherri Rae Rasmussen. Prosecutors allege a special circumstance -- that Lazarus killed Rasmussen during a burglary -- the Los Angeles Times reported Monday.

It stands, however, as one more argument against the myth of deterrence.  Related articles are in the deterrence category index.

Experts Say Death Penalty Doesn't Deter Murder

There's more coverage today of the Radelet & Lacock deterrence study.  That is the headline of an AFP report via Google News.  LINK

The death penalty fails to deter crime or lower murder rates, according to an overwhelming majority of top criminologists questioned for a US university study published this week.

Just over 88 percent of 79 experts from the American Society of Criminology said they did not think the death penalty "acts as a deterrent," researchers at Chicago's Northwestern University said in a statement.

In the study based on a similar 1996 report, the criminologists were asked for responses based on "their understanding of the empirical research," and not their personal opinion of the effects of capital punishment.

The 88.2 percent negative result is only a slight rise on the 1996 study's finding of 83.6 percent.

"Our survey indicates that the vast majority of the world's top criminologists believe that the empirical research has revealed (the) deterrence hypothesis as a myth," the statement said.

Lead researchers Michael Radelet and Traci Lack said 64 percent of the general public in a 2006 survey also thought the death penalty did not reduce murder rates.

On whether abolishing the death penalty could significantly effect homicides, 87 percent replied in the negative -- little change to the 86.5 percent in the 1996 study.

And 90.5 percent said they did not think a possible sentence of life imprisonment affected murder rates.

Earlier coverage is here; the report itself, here.

Initial News Coverage of Radelet & Lacock Deterrence Study

The Boulder Daily Camera reports, "Criminologists: Death penalty doesn't deter murder."  It's written by Elizabeth Miller.  Here's an extended excerpt:

Eighty-eight percent of criminologists do not believe the death penalty deters murder, according to a study by University of Colorado sociology professor Michael Radelet released Tuesday.

Radelet, who completed the study with attorney and CU sociology graduate student Traci Lacock, surveyed 77 leading criminologists on the death penalty’s effects on murder rates. The study was published in the Northwestern University School of Law’s Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.

“The deterrent effect of a punishment is really an effect of two things — severity and certainty — and it turns out that certainty is a more effective deterrent than severity,” Radelet said. “In Colorado, if we wanted to reduce the homicide rate, we would spend our money solving some of the 14,000 homicides that we know of that haven’t been solved. Anything we can do to increase the certainty of apprehension is a much better deterrent than taking people we already know will die in prison and spending millions to determine the date and cause of death.”

According to Radelet, 40 percent of homicide cases in Colorado remain unsolved.

A bill sponsored earlier this spring by state House Majority Leader Paul Weissmann, D-Louisville, which was designed to abolish capital punishment, passed the House of Representatives with a 33-32 vote. The bill later failed in the state Senate.

Studies conducted over the last 75 years have supported both sides of the argument on the death penalty, some with similar findings to Radelet’s and some suggesting that the death penalty does deter homicides better than long-term imprisonment.

Other studies often compare frequency of execution with the murder rate in states that have abolished the death penalty and those that have not, Radelet said. He said those studies show Texas, for example, had a murder rate of 5.1 per 100,000 people in 2007 and has put 439 people to death since 1976, while Colorado had a 3.9 murder rate in the same year and has put just one person to death since 1976.

The Daily Camera report also has this table:

The study, by the numbers

88 percent: Criminologists who do not believe the death penalty deters murder

87 percent: Criminologists who do not believe abolishing the death penalty would have a significant effect on murder rates

9 percent: Criminologists who believe that death-penalty states have lower homicide rates than other states

75 percent: Respondents who agreed with the statement: “Debates about the death penalty distract Congress and state legislatures from focusing on real solutions to crime problems.”

77: Number of criminologists who responded to the survey

At the Dallas Morning News Texas Death Penalty blog, Diane Jennings posts, "Local criminologist disagrees on study showing little deterrent value of death penalty."

Professor James Marquart, head of the criminology and sociology program at the University of Texas at Dallas disagrees with a recent study of criminologists nationwide that concluded the death penalty has little deterrent effect. According to a study by Michael Radelet, Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Colorado-Boulder and Traci Lacock, an attorney and Sociology graduate student, 88 percent of the country's "top criminologists" don't believe the death penalty acts as a deterrent.

Dr. Marquart, author of The Rope, the Chair and the Needle, and a former correctional officer, didn't participate in the study. He says academic findings "do support that, but in my own view...one must examine the facts in each case. It comes down to 'Do you have the right person?' And if you've got the right perpetrator, factually, legally and everything else, I believe that there is an individual deterrent value to it. And that means that if you have the right person and that person is executed, they are deterred. End of story."

This post from yesterday notes the new scholarship from Radelet and Lacock.  You can read their article here.  Related articles are in the deterrence category index.

The Latest on Deterrence

Mike Radelet and Traci Lacock have just published, "Do Executions Lower Homicide Rates?: The Views of Leading Criminologists," in The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology.  You can read the article here, in Adobe .pdf format, thanks to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Here's the text of a news release announcing the article:

Eighty-eight percent of the country’s top criminologists do not believe the death penalty acts as a deterrent to homicide, according to a new study published today in Northwestern University School of Law’s Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology authored by Professor Michael Radelet, Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and Traci Lacock, an attorney and Sociology graduate student in Boulder. 

Coming on the heels of New Mexico’s abolition of the death penalty and amid a national trend away from capital punishment because of concerns about its high costs, executing the innocent, unfairness in application, failure to provide “closure” for victims, and other issues, the study entitled “Do Executions Lower Homicide Rates? The Views of Leading Criminologists” undermines deterrence as a rationale for maintaining the punishment. 

Eighty-seven percent of the expert criminologists believe that abolition of the death penalty would not have any significant effect on murder rates. In addition, 75 percent of the respondents agree that “debates about the death penalty distract Congress and state legislatures from focusing on real solutions to crime problems.”

The survey relied on questionnaires completed by the most pre-eminent criminologists in the country, including: Fellows in the American Society of Criminology; winners of the American Society of Criminology’s prestigious Southerland Award; and recent presidents of the American Society of Criminology. The American Society of Criminology is the top professional organization of criminologists in the world.  Respondents were not asked for their personal opinion about the wisdom of the death penalty, but instead to answer the questions only on the basis of their understandings of the empirical research.      

The study concludes: “Our survey indicates that the vast majority of the world’s top criminologists believe that the empirical research has revealed the deterrence hypothesis for a myth … [T]he consensus among criminologists is that the death penalty does not add any significant deterrent effect above that of long-term imprisonment.”

Here's an excerpt from the introduction:

Ever since a young Edwin Sutherland first published research on the issue in 1925, criminologists have been interested in the question of whether the death penalty is a more effective deterrent to criminal homicide than long-term imprisonment. At least until a decade ago, there was widespread consensus among criminologists that the death penalty could not be justified on deterrence grounds. In November 1989, in part because "social science research ha[d] found no consistent evidence of crime deterrence through execution," the American Society of Criminology passed a resolution condemning the death penalty, one of only two public policy positions the organization has ever taken. In 1996, Radelet and Akers surveyed sixty-seven leading American criminologists regarding their opinion about the empirical research on deterrence and found that the overwhelming majority of the experts agreed that the death penalty never has been, is not, and never could be superior to long prison sentences as a deterrent to criminal violence.

The research reported in this Article was designed to update the 1996 study and assess if any recent deterrence studies have modified the beliefs of the world's leading criminologists. The results indicate that only a small minority of top criminologists-10% or less, depending on how the question is phrased-believes that the weight of empirical research studies supports the deterrence justification for the death penalty.

These results come despite the publication of several widely-cited studies conducted in the last half dozen years (primarily by economists) that claim to show the death penalty has deterrent effects that criminologists have not spotted.

Related articles are in the deterrence category index.

Death Penalty Saves Lives: A Prosecutor's View

That's the title of an OpEd by Eric Zahnd from the Kansas City Star.  He is the Platte County prosecuting attorney.  LINK

A recent editorial (5/14, A-14, “Death penalty system has serious flaws”) seeks a moratorium of the death penalty in favor of “a thorough study of the system.”

The editorial overlooks one important thing. Studies of the death penalty have already been conducted across the nation, and their verdict is clear: the death penalty is fairly administered; today’s defendants receive effective representation; and any errors during the investigation or trial are uncovered in the appellate process.

More importantly, a growing number of studies indicate something that should not be overlooked: the death penalty saves lives.

A dozen recent studies reveal that the death penalty has a significant deterrent effect. A leading study published in the American Law and Economics Review collected data from 3,054 counties over a 20-year period. Using sophisticated multiple regression analysis, the study concluded that, on average, each execution results in 18 fewer murders.

The results of these studies mean we are confronted by a stark decision with real consequences.

On the one hand, we can continue to carry out death sentences. In so doing, we will execute only those defendants who have been found guilty by unanimous juries that have taken the extra step to recommend a death sentence. The executions will occur only after the defendants have exhausted their rights of appeal and been afforded every possible due process right.

I'll simply point to the deterrence category index, and an excerpt from this post in particular.

Cass Sunstein and Justin Wolfers were quite clear in their OpEd,"The Murky Evidence for and Against Deterrence," that appeared in the June 30, 2008 issue of the Washington Post, and noted here.

In short, the best reading of the accumulated data is that they do not establish a deterrent effect of the death penalty.

Let me also link to the September 22, 2000 New York Times report, "States With No Death Penalty Share Lower Homicide Rates."

The dozen states that have chosen not to enact the death penalty since the Supreme Court ruled in 1976 that it was constitutionally permissible have not had higher homicide rates than states with the death penalty, government statistics and a new survey by The New York Times show.

Indeed, 10 of the 12 states without capital punishment have homicide rates below the national average, Federal Bureau of Investigation data shows, while half the states with the death penalty have homicide rates above the national average. In a state-by- state analysis, The Times found that during the last 20 years, the homicide rate in states with the death penalty has been 48 percent to 101 percent higher than in states without the death penalty.

The study by The Times also found that homicide rates had risen and fallen along roughly symmetrical paths in the states with and without the death penalty, suggesting to many experts that the threat of the death penalty rarely deters criminals.

"It is difficult to make the case for any deterrent effect from these numbers," said Steven Messner, a criminologist at the State University of New York at Albany, who reviewed the analysis by The Times. "Whatever the factors are that affect change in homicide rates, they don't seem to operate differently based on the presence or absence of the death penalty in a state."

A Federal Capital Case in New Jersey & the Deterrence Argument - UPDATED

Does the death penalty deter?  Lawmakers opposing repeal measures in legislatures across the country this year often expressed their belief that the death penalty is a deterrent.

Cass Sunstein and Justin Wolfers were quite clear in their OpEd,"The Murky Evidence for and Against Deterrence," that appeared in the June 30, 2008 issue of the Washington Post, and noted here.

In short, the best reading of the accumulated data is that they do not establish a deterrent effect of the death penalty.

That didn't stop a New Mexico district attorney from misstating Sunstein's view during the repeal debate in that state earlier this year.

For those who want to dive deep into the statistics and empirical studies, there is no better authority on deterrence than Columbia Law prof Jeffrey Fagan.  A small sample can be found in this post; much more at his SSRN page.

Even the general public has concluded deterrence is a myth.  Since 1999, according to the Harris Poll, only a minority of those surveyed have believed that the death penalty deters.

And then there is the anecdotal evidence.  The most recent example appears in Thursday's New York Times: "Lawyer's Ways Spelled Murder, U.S. Is Charging," written by David Kocieniewsky.

He spent a decade as a top prosecutor, trying murder cases in New Jersey, drug cases in federal court and a wide range of offenses in the military justice system.

He went on to become one of the state’s most prominent defense lawyers, representing clients as varied as Abu Ghraib defendants, the rap stars Lil’ Kim and Queen Latifah and members of Newark’s notorious street gangs.

But federal authorities charged Wednesday that the success their former colleague, Paul Bergrin, had in defending drug dealers and gang leaders was based on a brutal calculus that he had boiled down to a phrase he repeated like a slogan: No witnesses, no case.

In an indictment unsealed on Wednesday in United States District Court in Newark, prosecutors accused Mr. Bergrin, 53, of orchestrating the murder of a confidential witness by leaking his name to drug dealers who shot him in broad daylight on a Newark street corner; of traveling to Chicago to hire a murderer to kill a witness in another case; of coaching some eyewitnesses to lie; and of paying others to change their stories or leave town on the day they were to testify.

The charges, which left Mr. Bergrin in federal custody and facing a possible death penalty, were a stunning development for a flamboyant man who owned a Mercedes and a Bentley, hobnobbed with movie stars and boasted of beach homes in New Jersey and the Caribbean.

Bergrin is far from the first law enforcement official to be accused of capital murder.  If those closest to the law -- those who fully understand the elements of a crime that can lead to a death penalty prosecution -- are not deterred just who is?

Let's give Mr. Bergrin the presumption of innocence, but death rows and execution chambers have seen others in law enforcement convicted, condemned, and undeterred.

Let me update with two comments from Jeffrey Fagan:

One is the evidence that not only does the death penalty not deter, but that when we isolate the cases that are death-eligible, we still find no evidence of deterrence, even in places like Harris County, which generates plenty of executions. 

Second, the overwhelming weight of the scientific data is that there may or may not be deterrence, but that the evidence is so fragile and inconclusive - with studies pointing in all directions - that we cannot morally justify the decision to take lives based on it. 

The Road to Peace and Justice

That's the title of a speech delivered by New Jersey State Senator Raymond Lesniak, posted today at NJ.com.  LINK

On December 17, 2007, New Jersey became the first state in the Union to abolish the death penalty since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated it in 1976. When Governor Jon Corzine signed the legislation I sponsored into law, he also commuted the death sentences of eight human beings. The Community of Sant'Egidio in Rome, Italy, a lay Catholic organization committed to abolishing the death penalty throughout the world, lit up the Roman Coliseum to celebrate this victory for human rights.

How was this victory achieved? First, by demonstrating that the death penalty creates the possibility of executing an innocent human being. One of our founding founders, Benjamin Franklin, quoting the British Jurist William Blackstone, said: "It's better to let 100 guilty men go free than to imprison an innocent person." Yet Governor Corzine and my legislation let no guilty person go free. It merely replaced the death penalty with life without parole, eliminating the possibility of putting to death an innocent human being.

And:

Jeffrey Fagan, Professor of Law and Public Health, Columbia University and Steven Durlauf, Kenneth J. Arrow Professor of Economics, University of Wisconsin-Madison wrote in a letter to the Editor in the Philadelphia Enquirer on November 17, 2007:

"Serious researchers studying the death penalty continue to find that the relationship between executions and homicides is fragile and complex, inconsistent across the states, and highly sensitive to different research strategies. The only scientifically and ethically acceptable conclusion from the complete body of existing social science literature on deterrence and the death penalty is that it's impossible to tell whether deterrent effects are strong or weak, or whether they exist at all."

The professors concluded:

"Until research survives the rigors of replication and thorough testing of alternative hypotheses and sound impartial peer review, it provides no basis for decisions to take lives."

Earlier coverage of Lesniak begins with this post; more on New Jersey's abolition, here.

More Death Row Realism

Today's Austin American-Statesman reprints Jeanne Woodford's must-read OpEd, "Death Row Realism," published last week by the Los Angeles Times, as noted in this post.

Woodford is a former director of the California prison system and former warden at San Quentin.

As the warden of San Quentin, I presided over four executions. After each one, someone on the staff would ask, "Is the world safer because of what we did tonight?"

We knew the answer: No.  

I worked in corrections for 30 years, starting as a correctional officer and working my way up to warden at San Quentin and then on to the top job in the state — director of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. During those years, I came to believe that the death penalty should be replaced with life without the possibility of parole.

I didn't reach that conclusion because I'm soft on crime. My No. 1 concern is public safety. I want my children and grandchildren to have the safety and freedom to pursue their dreams. I know from firsthand experience that some people are dangerous and must be removed from society forever — people such as Robert Lee Massie.

I note that the OpEd is being reprinted by a number of other newspapers, as well.

Death Row Realism

That's the title of an OpEd in today's Los Angeles Times by Jeanne Woodford, former warden of San Quentin prison and former director of the California prison system.  It's subtitled, "Do executions make us safer? San Quentin's former warden says no."

Here's an extended excerpt of this must-read essay:

As the warden of San Quentin, I presided over four executions. After each one, someone on the staff would ask, "Is the world safer because of what we did tonight?"

We knew the answer: No.

I worked in corrections for 30 years, starting as a correctional officer and working my way up to warden at San Quentin and then on to the top job in the state -- director of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. During those years, I came to believe that the death penalty should be replaced with life without the possibility of parole.

I didn't reach that conclusion because I'm soft on crime. My No. 1 concern is public safety. I want my children and grandchildren to have the safety and freedom to pursue their dreams. I know from firsthand experience that some people are dangerous and must be removed from society forever -- people such as Robert Lee Massie.

I presided over Massie's execution in 2001. He was first sentenced to death for the 1965 murder of a mother of two. But when executions were temporarily banned in 1972, his sentence was changed to one that would allow parole, and he was released in 1978. Months later, he killed a 61-year-old liquor store owner and was returned to death row.

For supporters of the death penalty, Massie is a poster child. Yet for me, he stands out among the executions I presided over as the strongest example of how empty and futile the act of execution is.

I remember that night clearly. It was March 27, 2001. I was the last person to talk to Massie before he died. After that, I brought the witnesses in. I looked at the clock to make sure it was after midnight. I got a signal from two members of my staff who were on the phone with the state Supreme Court and the U.S. attorney general's office to make sure there were no last-minute legal impediments to the execution. There were none, so I gave the order to proceed. It took several minutes for the lethal injections to take effect.

I did my job, but I don't believe it was the right thing to have done. We should have condemned Massie to permanent imprisonment -- that would have made the world safer. But on the night we executed him, when the question was asked, "Did this make the world safer?" the answer remained no. Massie needed to be kept away from society, but we did not need to kill him.

Why should we pay to keep him locked up for life? I hear that question constantly. Few people know the answer: It's cheaper -- much, much cheaper than execution.

The deterrence index is here; the cost index, here.

A Death Penalty Puzzle

That's the title of an OpEd in today's Washington Post by Cass Sunstein and Justin Wolfers.  It's subtitled, "The Murky Evidence for and Against Deterrence."

To support their competing conclusions on the legal issue, different members of the court invoked work by each of us on the deterrent effects of the death penalty. Unfortunately, they misread the evidence.

Justice John Paul Stevens cited recent research by Wolfers (with co-author John Donohue) to justify the claim that "there remains no reliable statistical evidence that capital punishment in fact deters potential offenders." Justice Antonin Scalia cited a suggestion by Sunstein (with co-author Adrian Vermeule) that "a significant body of recent evidence" shows "that capital punishment may well have a deterrent effect, possibly a quite powerful one."

What does the evidence actually say?

One approach notes that in states with the death penalty, the average murder rate is about 40 percent higher than in states without the death penalty. Yet such comparisons are surely confounded by other influences, as those states that impose the death penalty also have a historic culture of violence, including lynching.

If we compare countries, the United States has higher execution and higher homicide rates than nearly all other industrialized countries. Here, too, many alternative explanations remain, making it hazardous to conclude that the death penalty does not deter murder.

Other studies have evaluated changes in homicide rates over time. In the 1960s, as the death penalty fell into disuse, homicide rates rose sharply, leading some studies to infer a deterrent effect. Moreover, a large-scale decline in homicide in the past two decades coincided with renewed use of the death penalty. Countering this, homicide and execution rates rose together in the 1920s and early 1930s, then fell together through the 1940s and 1950s. Because conclusions are so sensitive to the time period evaluated, these studies fail to provide much help.

More sophisticated studies compare the evolution of homicide rates across jurisdictions. Over the past six decades, the homicide rate in Canada has tracked that in the United States even as the countries' punishment policies have diverged sharply. Similarly, the 12 states that have not executed a prisoner since 1960 comprise a useful comparison group; murder rates in these states have largely tracked those in states that subsequently adopted or rejected the death penalty.

And:

In short, the best reading of the accumulated data is that they do not establish a deterrent effect of the death penalty.

Why is the Supreme Court debating deterrence? A prominent line of reasoning, endorsed by several justices, holds that if capital punishment fails to deter crime, it serves no useful purpose and hence is cruel and unusual, violating the Eighth Amendment. This reasoning tracks public debate as well. While some favor the death penalty on retributive grounds, many others (including President Bush) argue that the only sound reason for capital punishment is to deter murder.

The deterrence index is here.

Death Be Not?

That's the title of an editorial in Virginia's Richmond Times-Dispatch.  LINK

Del. Frank Hargrove, one of the General Assembly's Don Quixotes, hopes the umpteenth time will be the charm. He wants to end executions in Virginia, which stands second only to Texas in its zest for capital punishment.

Although there is some slight evidence that capital punishment might deter crime, its overall effect on crime trends is vanishingly small -- and it achieves no legitimate goals that cannot be achieved by a life sentence with no possibility of parole. (Spare us the nonsense about how execution protects fellow inmates and guards from psychopaths. A place like the supermax Pelican Bay prison is the place for them.)

Many arguments against capital punishment are flawed, but that does not make a case for execution. The only affirmative case that can be made on behalf of killing someone instead of locking him away forever is the sentiment that certain heinous fiends deserve to die. Indeed they do; indeed, they deserve much worse than that, and their death is certainly no great loss to the world. But the judicial system does not exist to mete out divine retribution.

Those who believe in limited government also should believe government ought to limit itself to protecting the public -- and ought to refrain from playing God. We long have supported capital punishment. Yet Hargrove sets a challenging example. To put a new spin on an old conservative trope: If it is not necessary to execute, then is it necessary not to execute? The question is growing tougher.

Last year the Chicago Tribune and the Dallas Morning News were among the papers that reversed longstanding editorial support for capital punishment, as noted here (Chicago) and here (Dallas.)  In both instances the newspaper editorial boards cited the cases of Ruben Cantu, Carlos DeLuna, and Cameron Willingham -- three likely innocents executed by Texas.  The editorial index is here.

Lufkin Daily News on Texas' Death Penalty

The Lufkin Daily News has an editorial, "Death Penalty," in response to Adam Liptak's New York Times report earlier this week, noted in this post.

The writer points out that Texas is one of the few states that permit the death penalty or carry through with it, once it has been levied. As the writer, Adam Liptak put it, "enthusiasm for executions outside of Texas dropped sharply."

That's not a bad thing, in our opinion. Not only has the death penalty proven ineffective as a deterrent, it has also proven to be extremely expensive. It costs much less to keep a murderer in prison for life than it does to defend a death penalty throughout an exhaustive appeals process. And the best argument against the death penalty is ... there's no undoing it if innocence is proven.

A district attorney in Oregon made another good point for avoiding the death penalty — the "needless anguish" that families of murder victims suffer during what can be decades of appeals, litigation and retrials.

There are district attorneys in Texas who are ambivalent about the death penalty as well. When Texas lawmakers proposed expanding the list of crimes for which the death penalty could be assessed to specific sex crimes, some prosecutors opposed the move, saying it might cause perpetrators to murder the victims in order to eliminate witnesses.

Our state isn't gaining anything by keeping the death penalty. But until lawmakers eliminate it as an option, or unless Texas juries quit assessing it, the only "significant and lasting development" we see is that Texas has become one of the few states that doesn't stop until justice is served.

Controversial Milestone: 25 Years of Lethal Injection

That's the title of R. G. Ratcliffe's report in today's Houston Chronicle.  LINK  Here's an extended excerpt:

Charlie Brooks Jr., 40, with a self-etched Born to Die tattoo on his left forearm, lay on the gurney in the Texas death chamber 25 years ago today and became the first person in the United States to die by lethal injection.

Brooks also was the first person executed in Texas after an 18-year moratorium. He was the sixth person executed in the U.S. after the U.S. Supreme Court temporarily halted capital punishment by forcing the states to rewrite their laws to limit executions to heinous crimes.

Brooks was executed for murdering a 26-year-old Fort Worth auto mechanic by shooting him in the face during a botched, drug-and-alcohol-induced kidnapping.

Shortly after Brooks' death, a typed letter passed among death row inmates telling them to "open their eyes," executions were about to begin again.

"We all felt capital punishment would be abolished and all sentences would be commuted to life," death row inmate Joseph John Cannon of San Antonio told reporters at the time. "The Brooks execution sure proved us all wrong."

Since the Brooks execution, an additional 404 Texas inmates were executed before the U.S. Supreme Court created a de facto moratorium in September by agreeing to consider Kentucky cases on whether the chemicals used in lethal injection amount to cruel and unusual punishment.

In the intervening years, the Texas Legislature expanded the types of crimes than can result in death, including the murder of a child under the age of 6.

At the same time, the Supreme Court has reduced the field of killers eligible for death by limiting executions of mentally retarded and people who commit their crimes when under the age of 18. Meanwhile, the debate continues over whether capital punishment is appropriate.

For one, there are questions about whether executions are carried out equitably.

There are 134 Texas counties — out of 254 — that have never sentenced a person to death. But Harris County, with 284 sentenced offenders, has sent more inmates to death row than Bexar, Dallas, El Paso, Tarrant and Travis counties combined, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice says.At the time Brooks committed his murder, Texas did not have a law that made accomplices equally liable. Brooks' accomplice, Woody Loudres, served 11 years for his role in the murder of David Gregory before being released on parole in 1989.

Most recently, the debate has focused on whether capital punishment is an effective deterrent to crime, or just retribution.

As Texas' execution chamber became one of the busiest in the nation, the state's murder rate dropped by half. Texas has executed four times as many inmates as any other state.

When Brooks was executed, the Texas murder rate was 16 per 100,000 residents, dropping to about 6 per 100,000 in 2005, the most recent year of statistics available from the Texas Department of Public Safety.

That decline could be because of the fact the Texas economy improved in the 1990s, or because of the fact the number of inmates housed in the Texas Department of Criminal Justice almost tripled in the 1990s, growing to more than 146,000 inmates, according to statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.

But while the murder rate has declined, the number of capital crimes in Texas has actually grown.

In the year Brooks was executed, there were 252 capital murder indictments returned in Texas. There were 489 capital murder indictments returned last year.

And yet few of those capital murder indictments result in a death sentence. Out of 5,025 capital murder indictments in the past decade, 274 resulted in death sentences, according to the Texas Office of Court Administration.

Steve Hall of the anti-death penalty Stand Down Texas said the statistics show capital punishment does not stop crime in Texas. "I don't think there is any credible evidence that demonstrates a deterrent effect from the death penalty."

And:

Columbia University law professor Jeffrey Fagan did an extensive study of capital murder in Harris County from 1976-2003. Fagan said the capital punishment does little to halt murder.

"We find no evidence of any marginal deterrent effect over and above whatever deterrent effect the criminal system may be creating by incarceration," Fagan said. "We don't see capital punishment adding anything to that effect."

Fagan's study in Harris County found that capital-eligible crimes grew in Houston from 1990 on during the same period that executions were on the rise, but non-capital murders declined.

"A good, efficient criminal legal regime that finds offenders once they commit crimes, calls them to account and punishes them proportionately and appropriately will keep crime rates in check," Fagan said. "You gain nothing by putting execution on top of that."

New York Law School professor and death penalty advocate Robert Blecker said executions are a "marginally effective deterrent." Blecker said the main reason to have the death penalty is to give justice to the murder victims.

"It would be nice if it was a more effective deterrent," Blecker said. "The issue for me is justice."

Coverage in Sunday's Fort Worth Star-Telegram of this 25th anniversary of lethal injection is here.  Expect more coverage tomorrow; the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty is issuing a report later today.

The Myth of Deterrence

That's the title of an editorial in Sunday's Dallas Morning News.  It's subtitled, "Death penalty does not reduce homicide rate."

In theory, the death penalty saves lives by staying the hand of would-be killers. The idea is simple cost-benefit analysis: If a man tempted by homicide knew that he would face death if caught, he would reconsider.

But that's not the real world. The South executes far more convicted murderers than any other region yet has a homicide rate far above the national average. Texas' murder rate is slightly above average, despite the state's peerless deployment of the death penalty. If capital punishment were an effective deterrent to homicide, shouldn't we expect the opposite result? What's going on here?

Human nature, mostly. Murder is often a crime of passion, which by definition excludes the faculties of reason. The jealous husband who walks in on his wife and another man is in no position to deliberate rationally on the consequences of killing his rival. The convenience store robber who chooses in a split-second to shoot the clerk has not pondered the potential outcomes of pulling the trigger.

People overtaken by rage, panic or drunkenness should be brought to justice, of course, but they are hardly paragons of pure reason, and it's unreasonable to assert that they consider the possibility of a death sentence when committing their crimes.

The editorial also contains this chart:

       Most per capita executions, Murder rate    

       Oklahoma, 5.8 

       Texas, 5.9    

       Delaware, 4.9    

       Virginia, 5.2    

       Missouri, 6.3    

• The 10 states with the lowest murder rates have collectively executed 11 people since 1976. That's only 1 percent of all executions carried out by states since the death penalty resumed.

• Nine of the 10 states with the highest murder rates in the country have the death penalty.   

SOURCES: Death Penalty Information Center; FBI      

Adam Liptak on Deterrence

His Sunday article in the New York Times is, "Does Death Penalty Save Lives? A New Debate."

For the first time in a generation, the question of whether the death penalty deters murders has captured the attention of scholars in law and economics, setting off an intense new debate about one of the central justifications for capital punishment.

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.”

The studies have been the subject of sharp criticism, much of it from legal scholars who say that the theories of economists do not apply to the violent world of crime and punishment. Critics of the studies say they are based on faulty premises, insufficient data and flawed methodologies.

The death penalty “is applied so rarely that the number of homicides it can plausibly have caused or deterred cannot reliably be disentangled from the large year-to-year changes in the homicide rate caused by other factors,” John J. Donohue III, a law professor at Yale with a doctorate in economics, and Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in the Stanford Law Review in 2005. “The existing evidence for deterrence,” they concluded, “is surprisingly fragile.”

Gary Becker, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1992 and has followed the debate, said the current empirical evidence was “certainly not decisive” because “we just don’t get enough variation to be confident we have isolated a deterrent effect.”

But, Mr. Becker added, “the evidence of a variety of types — not simply the quantitative evidence — has been enough to convince me that capital punishment does deter and is worth using for the worst sorts of offenses.”

The debate, which first gained significant academic attention two years ago, reprises one from the 1970’s, when early and since largely discredited studies on the deterrent effect of capital punishment were discussed in the Supreme Court’s decision to reinstitute capital punishment in 1976 after a four-year moratorium.

The early studies were inconclusive, Justice Potter Stewart wrote for three justices in the majority in that decision. But he nonetheless concluded that “the death penalty undoubtedly is a significant deterrent.”

The Supreme Court now appears to have once again imposed a moratorium on executions as it considers how to assess the constitutionality of lethal injections. The decision in that case, which is expected next year, will be much narrower than the one in 1976, and the new studies will probably not play any direct role in it.

But the studies have started to reshape the debate over capital punishment and to influence prominent legal scholars.

The article also carries links to the following studies:

Uses and Abuses of Empirical Evidence in the Death Penalty Debate, by John J. Donohue and Justin Wolfers (Stanford Law Review, December 2005)

Is Capital Punishment Morally Required?  Acts, Omissions and Life-Life Trade-offs, by Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermuele (Stanford Law Review, December 2005)

Does Capital Punishment Have a Deterrent Effect? New Evidence From Post-moratorium Panel Data, by Hashem Dezhbaksh, Paul H. Rubin and Joanna M. Shepherd (American Law and Economics Review 2003)

Deterrence Versus Brutalization: Capital Punsishment's Differing Impacts Among States, by Joanna Shepherd (Michigan Law Review, November 2005)

Prison Conditions, Capital Punishment and Deterrence, by Lawrence Katz, Steven D. Levitt and Ellen Shustorovich (American Law and Economics Review 2003)

Getting Off Death Row: Commuted Sentences and the Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment, by H. Naci Mocan and R. Kaj Gittings (Journal of Law and Economics, October 2003)

Capital Punishment and Capital Murder: Market Share and the Deterrent Effects of the Death Penalty, by Jeffrey Fagan, Franklin E. Zimring and Amanda Geller (Texas Law Review, June 2006)

Deterrence

On Friday, I linked to a Wall Street Journal OpEd on deterrence.  Also on Friday, the New York Post carried the OpEd by John Lott,  "Death Penalty's Deadly Vacation," that purported to demonstrate a deterrence effect to capital punishment.

Karl Keys has a response in "They seem to be getting desperate."  Here's a selection with a table:

Let me not bloviate. The table below shows the data for the years 1995 until 2006. Even the most rudimentary examinations shows that the murder rated dropped uniformly in states with and without the death penalty. The data also shows even as executions dropped the murder rate stayed level. The table also shows that the murder rates in abolitionist states continued to fall throughout the period the murder rate of retentionist states stalled.

I have also included in the chart the Houston MSA (The Houston Metropolitan Statistical Area includes Harris County and surrounding areas in Texas in its media market) as it is the singularly largest executing area of the country and IF a deterrent effect is observable it should be observable there.

Year	Houston MSA Murder	National Murder	Executing States	Nonexecuting States	Abolitionist States	Harris MSA Executions	National Executions
2006	9.6	5.7	—-	—-	3.1	9	53
2005	9.1	5.6	6	4.4	4	6	60
2004	7.8	5.5	6	4.2	4	9	59
2003	8	5.7	6.2	4.4	4.1	8	65
2002	8.4	5.6	6.1	4	4.3	4	77
2001	8.3	5.6	6.1	4.3	4.2	4	61
2000	7.7	5.5	5.9	4.3	4.2	7	85
1999	8.1	5.7	6.1	4.4	4.6	6	98
1998	8.8	6.3	6.8	4.6	4.6	5	68
1997	9.1	6.8	7.4	5.1	5	11	74
1996	9.8	7.4	8	6	5.4	1	45
1995	12	8.2	8.9	4.8	6.8	4	56

I should note that Prof. Harcourt in Asylum to the Prison: Rethinking the Incarceration Revolution, 84 Texas L. Rev. 1751 (2006). and over at SSRN, “From the Asylum to the Prison: Rethinking the Incarceration Revolution - Part II: State Level Analysis:” looks at data sets going back to the 1930s.

Also, thanks to Ron Tabak for distributing the Post OpEd.

 

The Myth of Detterence

The Wall Street Journal has an OpEd by Roy Adler and Michael Summers, "Capital Punishment Works."  Both are at Pepperdine University; Adler is a marketing professor, Summers a quantitative methods professor. 

There is a small group of academics who purport to find a deterrent effect through the death penalty.  I'm not aware of any serious study that actually demonstrates one.  I look forward to seeing a rebuttal from Jeffrey Fagan, the Columbia law professor who has written extensively on the flaws of this research and the lack of evidence of any deterrent.  Here's the opening of the Adler, Summers OpEd:

Most commentators who oppose capital punishment assert that an execution has no deterrent effect on future crimes. Recent evidence, however, suggests that the death penalty, when carried out, has an enormous deterrent effect on the number of murders. More precisely, our recent research shows that each execution carried out is correlated with about 74 fewer murders the following year.

For any society concerned about human life, that type of evidence is something that should be taken very seriously.

The study examined the relationship between the number of executions and the number of murders in the U.S. for the 26-year period from 1979 to 2004, using data from publicly available FBI sources. The chart nearby shows the number of executions and murders by year. There seems to be an obvious negative correlation in that when executions increase, murders decrease, and when executions decrease, murders increase.

In the early 1980s, the return of the death penalty was associated with a drop in the number of murders. In the mid-to-late 1980s, when the number of executions stabilized at about 20 per year, the number of murders increased. Throughout the 1990s, our society increased the number of executions, and the number of murders plummeted. Since 2001, there has been a decline in executions and an increase in murders.

It is possible that this correlated relationship could be mere coincidence, so we did a regression analysis on the 26-year relationship. The association was significant at the .00005 level, which meant the odds against the pattern being simply a random happening are about 18,000 to one. Further analysis revealed that each execution seems to be associated with 71 fewer murders in the year the execution took place.

The deterence index is here.

Death Penalty Not a Good Answer to Crime

That's the title of an OpEd in the Cincinnati Enquirer by Ohio attorney William Gallagher.  LINK

A recent Your Voice columnist argued that capital punishment is a deterrent ("Tougher law enforcement has strong plus side," June 16). However, polls and statistics fail to support such contentions. Additionally, behavioral scientists would disagree that killing convicted murderers leads to less violence.

It is extremely difficult if not impossible to determine why a crime never happened.

What we do know is most killings are not planned. They occur without much thought by people who intend to get away with it. The likelihood of a punishment is rarely considered.

A poll of law enforcement professionals found that over 65 percent of police officers saw no deterrent value in capital punishment. An overwhelming majority favor it as a penalty but not for any assistance in preventing violence. It is viewed as punishment.

States with no death penalty do not have a higher murder rate than states with one. Recent enactments of capital punishment statutes by a number of states have not resulted in a reduction in the murder rates. It has however added additional costs to prosecutor and defender offices. It has led to increases in courts' budgets. It has led to trial delays.

A University of Texas study found an increase in the homicide rate in the days before and after an execution in the state of Texas. The clear message is that violence leads to more violence.

The reasons for abolishing the death penalty are as strong and true as they have ever been.Those who face death as a punishment are poor, accused of killing a white person, afforded fewer resources to defend the case and ultimately cost taxpayers significantly more money than those who do not face the death penalty. The risk that we will execute an innocent person is still as real as it was 50 years ago.

More on Deterrence

Cassy Stubbs has "The Death Penalty Deterrence Myth," at HuffingtonPost.com

Among the many factors in the debate about the death penalty is whether capital punishment deters violent crime. Although solid research indicates that there is no valid evidence of such deterrence, recent attention has been given to a few flawed studies concluding that the death penalty does deter murder.

A June 10 Associated Press article pointed to statistical studies that claimed to directly link numbers of executions with numbers of murders prevented, including a 2003 study from the University of Colorado at Denver and studies from 2003 and 2006 by researchers at Emory University. But follow-up studies by top social scientists soundly reject those conclusions as well as the flawed methodology used to reach them. Jeffrey Fagan, a professor at Columbia Law School and an expert on statistics, testified to Congress that the Emory and Denver studies were "fraught with numerous technical and conceptual errors," and "fail[ed] to reach the demanding standards of social science."

The truth is that it might be impossible to determine a true statistical relationship between homicides and executions because the number of executions is so small compared to the number of homicides. But what we can say with certainty is that there is no legitimate statistical evidence of deterrence.

And:

Other statistical analyses show that states with the death penalty do not have the lowest murder rates in the country. In fact, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, states without the death penalty have consistently lower murder rates than states with the death penalty, even when comparing neighboring states. In addition, while southern states account for over 80 percent of the executions in this country, they have consistently had the highest murder rate of the nation's four regions.

Comparing American and Canadian statistics is also telling. While Canada has not had a single execution since 1972 and the United States has executed over 1,000 people in that time, the homicide rates in the United States and Canada have closely tracked each other. If anything, Canada's experience suggests that ending executions leads to a drop in the murder rate.

More on deterrence is here.

Study Says Death Penalty Deters Crime

That's the title of an AP report about a controversy over some studies that find a deterrent effect to capital punishment, a finding hotly disputed by other scholars.  LINK

Anti-death penalty forces have gained momentum in the past few years, with a moratorium in Illinois, court disputes over lethal injection in more than a half-dozen states and progress toward outright abolishment in New Jersey.

The steady drumbeat of DNA exonerations - pointing out flaws in the justice system - has weighed against capital punishment. The moral opposition is loud, too, echoed in Europe and the rest of the industrialized world, where all but a few countries banned executions years ago.

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.

And:

Some claim that the pro-deterrent studies made profound mistakes in their methodology, so their results are untrustworthy. Another critic argues that the studies wrongly count all homicides, rather than just those homicides where a conviction could bring the death penalty. And several argue that there are simply too few executions each year in the United States to make a judgment.

"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."

"This isn't left vs. right. This is a nerdy statistician saying it's too hard to tell," Wolfers said. "Within the advocacy community and legal scholars who are not as statistically adept, they will tell you it's still an open question. Among the small number of economists at leading universities whose bread and butter is statistical analysis, the argument is finished."

More on deterrence is here.

Use of Death Penalty Over Decades Point to Conflicted Public

That's the title of today's Deju Vu column by Cynthia Crossen in the Wall Street Journal.  A pass through link, which should be good for a week, is here.  The permalink for subscribers is here.

These were three of the 199 people who were hanged, gassed, electrocuted or faced the firing squad in 1935, the peak year of the death penalty in U.S. history. By contrast, last year 53 people were executed in the U.S. -- all but one by lethal injection. Between 1968 and 1976, not a single American was put to death for committing a crime.

A fever chart of executions over three centuries of U.S. history shows a country that has never made up its mind about capital punishment.

The 1930s were a turning point. During the 1920s and early 1930s, Americans were shocked by the spectacular crimes of such "public enemies" as Pretty Boy Floyd, Baby Face Nelson and Ma Barker's gang. In 1932, Charles Lindbergh Jr., son of one of the country's most loved heroes, was snatched from his crib and murdered. The following year, four police officers and their prisoner were gunned down in public in what became known as the Kansas City Massacre.

Even as America was reeling from this crime wave, however, social scientists were developing and publicizing a new theory of criminal behavior: Biological or environmental factors, not just free will, might be at work in a criminal's mind. Was it fair to kill someone for behavior essentially programmed into him or her?

"Capital punishment seals a life that often the culprit could not change if he wanted to," argued John J. Ryan, a New York assemblyman in 1915.

Meanwhile, a growing body of statistics about the deterrent effect of the death penalty was inconclusive and contradictory. One statistic, however, remained painfully obvious: African-Americans were executed at a much higher rate than whites, especially for rape.

Juries' attitudes toward capital punishment slowly began to shift. In the 1930s, an average of 167 people were executed each year; by the 1940s, that had dropped to 128 and by the 1950s to 72 executions a year.

America's first immigrants brought from England a strong faith in the virtue of the death penalty. In 18th-century England, a person could be sentenced to die for some 150 crimes, including forgery and horse theft. The list was much reduced in colonial America, but in theory you could still be put to death for witchcraft, blasphemy or homosexuality. In practice, however, it didn't make economic sense to kill able-bodied men and women when labor was so scarce.

In the mid-19th century, several states abolished the death penalty for all but a few crimes, usually murder and treason. Michigan got rid of the death penalty (except for treason) in 1846, partly as a reaction to the 1830 hanging of Stephen Simmons, who had murdered his wife when he was drunk. When sober, Simmons was a deeply religious man. At his hanging, where a band played to a packed bandstand, he sang a hymn -- "Show Pity, Lord; O Lord, Forgive" -- in his "fine baritone voice," a witness reported.

Thanks to David Dreyer for spotting this and sending it on.

Executions Avenge, But Don't Deter

That's the title of Rick Casey's column in today's Houston Chronicle.  LINK

Does the death penalty deter murders?

Some studies say it does. Some have even quantified the effect, projecting that for each murderer executed anywhere from three to 32 would-be victims are saved.

Other studies disagree.

The most recent, published in the current issue of the Texas Law Journal, features Texas and, in particular, Harris County in starring roles.

That's appropriate.

In the past 30 years, Texas has accounted for more than a third of executions nationwide, the study notes, four times more than runner-up Virginia.

And Harris County leads the state, with more than double the number of executions as runner-up Dallas County.

The study was performed by Jeffrey Fagan, professor of law and public health at Columbia University; Franklin E. Zimring, the William Simon professor of law and Wolfen Distinguished Scholar at the law school at the University of California at Berkeley, and Amanda Geller, a doctoral candidate in social work at Columbia.

And:

I guess you could argue that while the death penalty doesn't appear to have affected the capital murder rate, it has diminished other homicides.

But that would be a stretch, since a large percentage of non-capital homicides include manslaughter, vehicular homicide and other non-intentional killings.

"I think deterrence is true in many areas of the law," said Fagan. "Seat belts, smoking, some tax cheats are deterred.

"But murder is a different animal. It is committed by a type of person who is not the rational being that deterrence law thinks he is."

I once heard a similar theme from a Dallas U.S. attorney. He wasn't arguing against the death penalty, just in favor of white-collar prosecutions.

You can prosecute a thousand convenience-store gunmen and you won't prevent a single convenience-store holdup, he said. But throw one doctor into prison for Medicare fraud and you will help some other doctors resist temptation.

Jeffrey Fagan on Deterrence

"Capital Punishment: Detterence Effects and Capital Costs," is the title of Fagan's latest scholarship on the subject.  LINK

Others find that any deterrent effects are specific to Texas, a state that is atypical by (until 2005) denying juries the choice between execution and life without parole. The studies also may unreasonably inflate the effects of execution by cutting the analyses in 1998, thereby excluding later years when homicides declined, as did executions. Still others find the evidence of deterrence very fragile and unstable, with estimates of deterrence changing wildly with even the slightest adjustments or modifications either in measurement or statistical methods. Such instability should signal caution in not only causal inference, but in using these data in policy decisions or law when life and death are at stake.

Finally, the moving parts in the deterrence story are unpersuasive. Execution would have to achieve a marginal cost beyond the threat of lifetime incarceration. There is no evidence that this is the case. would have to occur with sufficient frequency and with widespread knowledge among would-be murderers to create a credible threat considering the types of murders that might be eligible for execution. There is no sign of that, nor does it seem likely. example, there were 16,137 murders in 2004, according to the FBI, but only 125 death sentences were handed out, and 59 persons - most of whom were convicted a decade earlier - were executed. There are no direct tests of deterrence among murderers, nor are there studies showing their awareness of executions in their own state, much less in far-away states. There is no evidence that if aware of the possibility of execution, a potential murderer would rationally decide to forego homicide and use less lethal forms of violence. Murder is a complex and multiply determined phenomenon, with cyclical patterns for distinct periods of more than 40 years of increase and decline that are not unlike epidemics of contagious diseases. There is nothing in the new deterrence studies that fits their story into this complex causal framework.

As a public policy choice, execution requires tradeoffs of public resources and investments for state legislators and local prosecutors. The costs of administering capital punishment are prohibitive. Even in states where prosecutors infrequently seek the death penalty, the price of obtaining convictions and executions ranges from $2.5 million to $5 million per case (in current dollars), compared to less than $1 million for each killer sentenced to life without parole.30 These costs create clear public policy choices. If the state is going to spend $5 million on law enforcement over the next few decades, what is the best use of that money? Is it to buy two or three executions or, for example, to fund additional police detectives, prosecutors, and judges to arrest and incarcerate criminals who escape punishment because of insufficient law-enforcement resources?

Thanks to Karl Keys for dutifully digesting the Tarlton Law Library's latest RSS feed.