I have a distinct recollection of one of my first lectures at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Stephen Schulhofer, a brilliant academic (he's now at NYU) who looked as if he'd responded to Central Casting's call for a liberal, was leading a discussion of the death penalty - and he was having difficulty finding anyone to speak in support.
I still had hair back then, admittedly not much, and perhaps my close-cropped coif was just the invitation Schulhofer needed to include me as a participant as he looked for a contrarian. I took the bait and weighed in.
"But do you think it's a deterrent, Mr. Smerconish?" he pressed. When I responded affirmatively, my classmates literally hissed their disapproval.
For me, the only thing that has changed relative to the death penalty in the intervening 20 years is that I've grown accustomed to the public ridicule that often accompanies my view. I still think it's a deterrent, and my opinion is emboldened by a recent analysis of execution and homicide data published in the Wall Street Journal.
Roy Adler and Michael Summers, both professors at Pepperdine University, have recently analyzed the relationship between the number of U.S. executions by year and the number of murders in the year thereafter for 1979-2004. They relied on raw data supplied by the Death Penalty Information Center and the FBI.
They have documented a relationship between capital punishment and the future rate of homicide. When executions leveled off, the professors found, murders increased. And when executions increased, the number of people murdered dropped off. In a year-by-year analysis, Adler and Summers found that each execution was associated with 74 fewer murders the following year.
That's a stunning statistic, but as I have already learned, not one that will necessarily sway death-penalty opponents. When I shared the data last week with actor, M.A.S.H. TV star, and death-penalty opponent Mike Farrell, he dismissed it as "peddled" and part of an agenda: "It's a claim, it's a typical claim that comes up periodically, and it's been refuted generally. As is always the case, this hard data is analyzed by people that have a bias one way or the other."
But one of the Pepperdine professors assured me they brought no agenda to the table.
"The morality of the issue is something for someone else to argue," Adler, himself a Fulbright professor, told me this month. "We're just simply presenting the data and lifting the veil that says, 'There's no deterrent effect, therefore . . . ' Well, there is, and it's about 74 to 1. And other people can argue moral grounds on either side."
Based on their analysis, Adler and Summers properly recast the issue that confronts society when deciding whether to implement the death penalty. The question is not whether to spare the life of the convicted, but rather, whether to spare the lives of 74 innocents in the year that follows.
"Our intent was to open this up to a dialogue. The ratio is not 'save a life or not;' it's 'save this life or save dozens of others next year.' And that's a much more difficult moral dilemma that deserves wide discussion, I think," Adler told me.
My interview with Adler and review of his work with Summers reminded me of a similar body of work conducted in the 1980s by a then-Auburn University criminology professor named Steven Stack. Now a professor at Wayne State University, Stack sought to answer a more specific question: Do well-publicized executions deter future homicides? Because if the public is unaware of an execution, Stack argued, its deterrent effect cannot be calculated.
Stack targeted 16 execution cases between 1950 and 1980 that met his criterion for "nationally publicized." His analysis led him to conclude that approximately 30 fewer homicides are committed in the month that follows a publicized execution story.
When I caught up with Stack last week, he told me his work has withstood the test of time and that he was looking forward to publishing an update that is currently being circulated for peer review. When I told him his findings were not as significant as those of Adler and Summers, he appropriately quipped, "I suppose it's especially significant if you're one of those 30 people who would've been killed otherwise."
Of course, what put the issue of crime and capital punishment on my mind was the violence against Philadelphia police officers, specifically the murder of Officer Chuck Cassidy. How ironic that one day after the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office decided not to pursue death for Solomon Montgomery (who pleaded guilty to the brutal killing of Officer Gary Skerski), the execution of Officer Cassidy rocked the city anew.
You can't blame the D.A.'s Office or the Skerski family for not pressing for Montgomery's execution. No doubt they were reflecting that in one month, the Faulkner family will mark the 26-year anniversary of the night Mumia Abu-Jamal murdered Officer Danny Faulkner - a death-penalty case with no end in sight. Soon, the Cassidy family may have to make its wishes known relative to John Lewis, given his confession Tuesday to the murder of Chuck Cassidy.
Meanwhile, the U.S. Supreme Court has instituted a de facto death-penalty moratorium. For all practical purposes, capital punishment is on life support.
Too bad.
Because while the academics tabulate their evidence suggesting that the death penalty deters crime, what I told my law professor at Penn two decades ago remains incontrovertible. When he asked me if I thought the death penalty was a deterrent, I borrowed a line I'd heard Frank Rizzo once deliver.
"Professor," I said, "I know it deters at least one person at a time."
I agree with the blog author, in that it may serve to deter crime in certain places; however, that doesn't mean it's OK or that it measures up against other necessary considerations when speaking of justice for all, like...
(1) those who are put to death who may have been innocent; or,
(2) who/what determines which crimes warrant the death penalty & which fall outside it; and,
(3) where does it stop?
At what point, do we chose to spare the person headed to Death Row on the basis of, say, severe, untreated mental illness or retardation, abuse, etc ... & how do we justify such leniency when weighed against others who did receive the death penalty?
No matter what the blog author asserts at the close, there really are no easy answers to this question of 'justice.'
Kelli
Actual statistics show that blacks are sentenced to death disproportionately and for less serious crimes than whites. There are clearly shortcomings in our judicial system, the best we can do right this minute is make sure we don't continue to make mistakes that can't be fixed or undone.
If you really wanted to stop all murders you could collect all the knives, guns, and pointed sticks and deputize three quarters of us, maybe torture offenders, but some things offend our sense of freedom. Right now, with the sloppiness of our criminal justice system, the death penalty is one of those things.
September 22, 2000
STATES WITH NO DEATH PENALTY SHARE LOWER HOMICIDE RATES
By RAYMOND BONNER and FORD FESSENDEN
"...states that have chosen not to enact the death penalty since [...] 1976 [...] have not had higher homicide rates than states with the death penalty, government statistics [...]show."
"...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. [...]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.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?did=437&scid=
Also consider this:
Canada abolished the death penalty in 1976, and Canada's murder rate dropped 43% in 24 years, from 3.09 in 1975 to 1.76 in 1999...
During the 1990s, while the US execution rate grew markedly, the amount that the murder rates of the US states with the death penalty, were higher than the rates of the US states without the death penalty, grew markedly as well; and, while the murder rates of the death penalty states declined markedly during that period, the murder rates of the abolitionist states declined considerably more...
Full story here: http://davecoop.net/adp.htm
Consider this:
---The vast majority of those executed were poor. About 90% could not afford a lawyer when they went to trial. They had to rely upon a court-appointed lawyer.
---The homicide rate in those states with the death penalty is almost double the rate in states without the death penalty.
http://www.religioustolerance.org/execut3.htm
Correlation is not causation. This essay is pure propaganda.
Do you know what correlation is? You know, as opposed to causation?
* Crime rates have increased in the past 50 years. - True.
* Executions are less common now than they were 50 years ago. - True
Is that proof of causation? Only if you want it to be. Say, did you actually think about the fact that non-murder crimes have also escalated in recent decades, despite the fact that these were never punishable by death?
And, as you yourself say, this is aside from the moral question. The question of whether citizens--many guilty and some innocent--may ethically be killed by the state when they can more easily be kept in penitence and unable to harm others is not on the table here. This is simply about whether it works, and the evidence is pretty damned scant. Would you err on the side of murder?
Randy Greenawalt
Jesse James Gillies
Robert Wayne Vickers
We just need to convict 2 or 3 of them (Cheney? Rove? Chimpo?), and execute them for treason and crimes against the Constitution, and most likely, the remaining criminals in the administration would be intimidated into following the law, NOT $tealing from the Treasury, NOT starting illegal war$ based on lies, etc etc etc etc
Neocons need to know that they can
be executed too, just like the Rosenbergs.
The true test of the Death penalty would be if it could stop Bush & his Boyz from continuing their massive ongoing Corporate Crime Wave.
I think it's worth a try.
Murder rates are not higher in states without the death penalty, and other countries without it have less violent crime. I hope I'm forgiven for not suddenly changing my opinion because some blogger developed a "feeling" that it deters because he felt like being a contrarian in a college class.
In my opinion most murderers are probably either conscienceless and don't care what the consequences are (or else think they can get away with it), mentally ill, or do it in the passion of the moment (i.e. a man walking into his wife's bedroom while she's having an affair). Think about it, being in jail for the rest of your life is not a nice thing either. I doubt most criminals go "Well I would kill the guy if only I would spend the rest of my life miserable in a small prison cell, but since I might get the death penalty after 20+ years I think I'll have to think this through." It's absurd.
Barbaric acts deter, you say?? Well, Duh!!!!!
Also, there are different types of murder. A kid who panics and shoots a clerk during a convenience store robbery will not be deterred by the death penalty. How many murderers plan ahead, in which case there might be a deterrence factor?
The overriding fact is that juries are not fair or infallible. Neither are judges, prosecutors, witnesses.
An argument can be made that confining a human being in a prison system that has become a nightmare of violence and cruelty, worthy of the dark ages, is cruel and unusual punishment. Reform is needed to reorient the system to education, work, and rehabilitation, and yet, many Americans seem to take satisfaction in having the state punish behind locked doors. Is torture part of American culture?
There is no doubt that some prisoners are guilty of the most inhuman crimes. Why not offer suicide in lieu of life on death row? Even the "barbaric" Romans understood the difference between punishment by the state vs. ultimate responsibility.
But execution is so far removed from the act -- years of appeals and such -- and so randomly applied, that it can't be anything but an abstract concept for the typical killer. He's going to worry more about getting caught, period, than whether special circumstances might land him on death row.
And, really, this should all be moot because capital punishment is ten kinds of wrong. The sooner we're rid of it, the better.
-- Christian Gulliksen
Hardly proof, I admit, of a deterrent effect, but I believe publicized executions give pause to the impressionable.
That said, until our system of justice becomes far more color-blind and error free, the death penalty is a no-no.
I am pretty sure you had to take a course or two in statistics to earn that Phi Beta Kappa. Shame on you for deliberately using a single, unvalidated social science research study as "incontrovertible proof" supporting your long-standing opinion.
As you undoubtedly know, social science research relies much more on qualitative data than quantitative and are subject to more confounding factors. While we would all like to trust that the Pepperdine study is methodologically clean and free of bias, even the primary investigator of that study would concede that it requires validation. Until such time, you know and I know you are attempting to influence opinion using an argument which is flawed on its face.