That's the title of Paul Waldman's article in the current issue of American Prospect. It's subtitled, "We're left to argue only the moral question."
When he was running for president in 2000, George W. Bush was often asked about the fact that as governor of Texas, he executed 152 people, more than any other governor in modern history at the time (though his successor Rick Perry has since surpassed him). Bush always responded that he believed the death penalty saves lives. In other words, his primary justification was a practical argument, not a moral argument. But the empirical evidence on the question of whether the death penalty was always fuzzy at best.
Like most death penalty opponents, I was always very skeptical of claims like Bush's (isn't that odd, how our beliefs about what is always seem to line up so neatly with our beliefs about what ought to be). Despite what you might believe from watching Law & Order, most murders aren't carefully planned so that the perpetrator can get his hands on his grandmother's fortune, giving him plenty of time to contemplate the potential consequences if he gets caught. People who kill other people tend to do it out of anger or desperation, and the idea that some significant number of them would stop themselves if they knew they might be executed if they got caught, but go ahead with the murder if they knew they'd spend the rest of their lives in jail, just doesn't make much sense.
So why haven't social scientists been able to answer this question definitively? The main problem is that there just aren't enough executions to give you the kind of healthy sample size you need. As Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers tell us, the National Academy of Sciences has concluded that the existing research on the topic just can't tell us one way or the other whether the death penalty has any deterrent effect.
And:
In a way, the practical claims are too easy to make. It certainly made it easy for Bush—he could just say the death penalty saves lives, and he didn't need to provide a moral justification for the execution assembly line they have in the Lone Star State. The moral claims require you to be clearer about your values. That's a debate we ought to have.
More on the Stevenson/Wolfers column at the link; it begins coverage of the National Research Council study on deterrence. Related posts are in the deterrence index.
Comments