Atom Smasher:
Patently untrue.
The numbers show conclusively that there is a deterrent effect.
‘Patently untrue?’ ‘Conclusive?’ Those are mighty strong words. I encourage you to prove me wrong.
States with the death penalty have consistently higher murder rates (
source), and murder rates drop when there are less executions. It’s sometimes argued that murder rose as the number of executions fell from the mid-1960’s-1970’s, but as William Bowers noted “[C]ompared with yearly changes in the national homicide rates from 1962 on, states with reduced executions tended to have reduced homicide rates and those with increased executions tended to have increased homicide rates.” (Bowers, William J. (1988). “The Effect of Executions is Brutalization, Not Deterrence,” pp 49-89 in KC. Haas and J.A. Inciardi (eds.)
Challenging Capital Punishment: Legal and Social Science Approaches.)
In the textbook
Criminology (8th edition) by Larry Siegel, “The most thorough research efforts fail to find any relationship between the use of capital punishment and reductions in the violence rate. For example, Keith Harries and Derral Cheatwood studied differences in homicide rates in 293 contiguous counties within the United States that differed in the use of capital punishment and found that there were actually higher violent crime rates in counties that routinely employed the death penalty.” In 1980, William Bowers and Glenn Pierce found:
In this study, we find that in New York State over the period 1907-63 there were, on the average, two additional homicides in the month after an execution. Controls for time trends, seasonality, the effects of war, and adjustments for autocorrelation tend to confirm this finding. Such a “brutalizing” effect of executions is consistent with research on violent events such as publicized suicides, mass murders, and assassinations; with previous studies of the long-term effects of the availability and use of capital punishment; and with a small number of investigations of the short-term impact of executions in the days, weeks, and months that follow. This suggests that the message of executions is one of “lethal vengeance” more than deterrence. The resulting sacrifice of human life challenges the constitutionality of capital punishment (
source).
Professor Robert Bohm, in his book
Deathquest (2nd edition), cites they also found “roughly three more to the number of homicides in the next nine months of the year after the execution.” In 1994, John Cochran, Mitchell Chamlin, and Mark Seth found:
On September 10, 1990 Charles Troy Coleman was put to death by lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. Coleman’s execution was the first in the state in more than 25 years, generating significant media coverage and providing a unique opportunity to assess the impact of the state's return to executing capital offenders. Interrupted time-series analyses are performed with weekly data from the UCR Supplemental Homicide Reports for the state for the period January 1989 through December 1991. Analyses are performed for the total level of criminal homicides and homicides disaggregated into two types of murder–felony murder and stranger homicides–testing hypotheses that predict opposing impacts for each type of homicide. As predicted, no evidence of a deterrent or a brutalization effect is found for criminal homicides in general. Similarly, the predicted deterrent effect of the execution on the level of felony murders is not observed. Evidence of the predicted brutalization effect on the level of stranger homicides is observed, however. Supplementary analyses on further offense disaggregations continue to support these initial findings and permit a more coherent interpretation of the results (
source).
Most murders are “crimes of passion” between people who know each other, often under the influence of alcohol or drugs, and it’s therefore unsurprising why the death penalty would have no deterrent effect for felony murders, since crimes of passion are not governed by premeditation. But the story is different for murders involving strangers, for which premeditation plays a greater role, and there is a brutalization effect. Robert Bohm writes in his book
Deathquest, “One variant of this phenomenon is call the ‘suicide-murder syndrome,’ which is illustrated by the case of Pamela Watkins. Watkins was ‘a babysitter in San Hose who had made several unsuccessful suicide attempts and was frightened to try again. She finally strangled two children so that the state of California would execute her.’ (…) Another variant of this phenomenon has been termed the ‘executioner syndrome.’ Those afflicted with the problem believe their killing performs a public service by eliminating a problem. Still another variant from the pathological desire to die by execution. Finally, what is known about capital murderers, it is likely that some of them kill to gain attention and notoriety that being executed might bring: Their executions provide them a stage that would not be available to them under different circumstances.”
In 1983, a study by Dane Archer, et al. studied the effects of eliminating the death penalty in Austria (1968), Canada (1967), Denmark (1930), England and Wales (1965), Finland (1949), Israel (1954), Italy (1890), Netherland Antilles (1957), Norway (1905), Sweden (1921), and Switzerland (1942). While some countries experienced an increase in murder after abolition, most countries experienced a drop, which is evidence against a deterrent effect.
The first prominent study to find a general deterrent effect was in 1975 by economics professor Isaac Ehrlich, but numerous studies have failed to find the effect, including Peter Passell (1975), William J. Bowers and Glenn L. Pierce (1975), Brian Forst (1977), Scott Decker and Carol Kohfeld (1984, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1990), and Jon Sorensen, et al. (1999). The critique being “if the period of analysis is extended beyond 1965 to include years when executions had dwindled to one or two or had actually ceased, and only if logarithmic values of the variables are used, giving disproportionate weight to these recent years in the regression analysis” only then would there be a deterrent effect (Bowers, 1984). “Some [other] studies do reveal a short-term deterrent effect [after highly publicized executions], but in no case does the decrease in homicides last very long. Moreover, replications and reanalyses of these studies tend to show brutalizing, rather than deterrent, effects of execution publicity” (Bohm).
speed dog:
Fear is what preserves the order of things. If the death penalty was actually handed out for violent crimes as it should, it would definitely be a deterrent. That's common sense.
But common sense is wrong.
Such critics claim that a return to the “good old days” of more frequent and swifter executions would produce deterrence. Evidence from the good old days, however, belies that hope.
During the 1930s for example, there were a total of 1,676 executions in the United States. That represents 167 executions per year, 14 executions per month, and the most executions in a single decade of the twentieth century. The most executions in any single year since 1930, the first year records were kept by the U.S. government, were the 199 recorded in 1935. Furthermore, although data on the celerity for 1951-1960 show that the average time between death sentence and execution was 14.4 months (the range was from 4.6 to 46.1 monthly); the average for 2000 was 137 months. If capital punishment had a deterrent effect, and the frequency and celerity of executions were important, then one might expect a relatively low murder rate for the decade. The evidence shows, though, that homicide rates were higher in the 1930s than in the 1940s, 1950s, and early-to-mid-1960s—decades that had fewer executions. Historical evidence provides no reason to believe that increasing the frequency and celerity of executions would dramatically increase the death penalty’s deterrent effect (Bohm).
And that, my friends, is a Deep Dish™ serving of deep dish pizza.
