- Some innocent people are put to death, which is exactly the same thing as murder, and thus makes the state itself an instrument of the very crime to which it believes the death penalty should be applied. (Motive doesn't matter, only the consequences thereof.)
- The deterrent effect is highly dubious. All of the claimed evidence for it comes from econometric studies, while all opposing evidence is sociological and demographic. See the bottom for references.
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.also,
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.”
“I am definitely against the death penalty on lots of different grounds,” said Joanna M. Shepherd, a law professor at Emory with a doctorate in economics who wrote or contributed to several studies. “But I do believe that people respond to incentives.”The first sentence of the second paragraph should be seized upon. An overwhelming majority of murders are not committed by people in a cool, calm, rational frame of mind. Besides, if killing murderers is effective at preventing future murders, so too would life imprisonment with no chance of parole. This latter option would actually be cheaper, not to mention more moral, as there would be no chance of killing an innocent person and any innocent parties would have ample time to file appeals and work towards showing exculpatory evidence.
But not everyone agrees that potential murderers know enough or can think clearly enough to make rational calculations. And the chances of being caught, convicted, sentenced to death and executed are in any event quite remote. Only about one in 300 homicides results in an execution.
One of the ways I wish our system would strengthen punishment is towards child molesters, whose "cure" rate is all but zero and who habitually go from bad to worse as they employ violence to cover up their crimes once they've been caught the first time. Think Jessi Lunsford.
As a father, I would have a hard time not wanting to execute vigilante justice on that motherfucker John Couey. I just hope I'll not ever be put in a position in which it is necessary to restrain my wrath.
References:
PRO-Abolition:
- ...THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the American Psychological Association: Calls upon each jurisdiction in the United States that imposes capital punishment not to carry out the death penalty until the jurisdiction implements policies and procedures that can be shown through psychological and other social science research to ameliorate the deficiencies identified above.
- "Since 1973, over 120 people have been released from death row with evidence of their innocence. (Staff Report, House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil & Constitutional Rights, Oct. 1993, with updates from DPIC). In 2000, 8 inmates were freed from death row and exonerated; in 2001 – 2002, another 9 were freed; and in 2003, 12 were exonerated. In 2004, there were 6 exonerations." (Death Penalty Info)
- "Consistent with previous years, the 2004 FBI Uniform Crime Report showed that the South had the highest murder rate. The South accounts for over 80% of executions. The Northeast, which has less than 1% of all executions, again had the lowest murder rate." (Death Penalty Info)
- "According to a survey of the former and present presidents of the country's top academic criminological societies, 84% of these experts rejected the notion that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder. (Radelet & Akers, 1996)" (Death Penalty Info)
Michael L. Radelet, Ronald L. Akers
The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology (1973-), Vol. 87, No. 1 (Autumn, 1996), pp. 1-16
http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1143970 FULL-TEXT (.pdf)
2) Capital Punishment and Homicide: Sociological Realities and Econometric Illusions
Ted Goertzel, Ph.D. Sociology Department -- Rutgers U
http://www.csicop.org/si/2004-07/capital-punishment.html FULL-TEXT: (.pdf)
3) The Changing Nature of Death Penalty Debates
Michael L. Radelet; Marian J. Borg
Annual Review of Sociology, Vol. 26. (2000), pp. 43-61.
http://arjournals.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.43 FULL-TEXT: (.pdf)
excerpt -- "...Overall, the vast majority of deterrence studies have failed to support the hypothesis..."
PRO-Death Penalty:
4) Does Capital Punishment Have a Deterrent Effect? New Evidence from Postmoratorium Panel Data
Hashem Dezhbakhsh, Paul H. Rubin and Joanna M. Shepherd
American Law and Economics Review V5 N2 2003 (344-376)
http://aler.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/5/2/344 FULL-TEXT: (.pdf)
5) The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: Evidence from a "Judicial Experiment"
Hashem Dezhbakhsh and Joanna M. Shepherd
Economic Inquiry 2006 44(3):512-535; doi:10.1093/ei/cbj032
http://ei.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/44/3/512 FULL-TEXT: (.pdf)
6) Does Capital Punishment Deter Homicide?
[A Response to (2) above]
http://libertycorner.blogspot.com/2004/10/does-capital-punishment-deter-homicide.html
excerpt -- "...Now, I must say that I don't care whether or not capital punishment deters homicide. Capital punishment is the capstone of a system of justice that used to work quite well in this country because it was certain and harsh. There must be a hierarchy of certain penalties for crime, and that hierarchy must culminate in the ultimate penalty if criminals and potential criminals are to believe that crime will be punished. When punishment is made less severe and less certain -- as it was for a long time after World War II -- crime flourishes and law-abiding citizens become less secure in their lives and property."
