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.
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