"Does Death Penalty Save Lives? A New Debate"

This is easy for me. It doesn't matter whether the research on the issue is valid or not. I'm against the death penalty. Period.:

Does Death Penalty Save Lives? A New Debate, by Adam Liptak, NY Times: ...According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented.  The effect is most pronounced, according to some studies, in Texas and other states that execute condemned inmates relatively often and relatively quickly. The studies, performed by economists in the past decade, ... say that murder rates tend to fall as executions rise. ...

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.

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... “The existing evidence for deterrence,” they concluded, “is surprisingly fragile.”

Gary Becker, who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1992 ..., 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...”

The ... studies have started to reshape the debate over capital punishment and to influence prominent legal scholars. ... To a large extent, the participants in the debate talk past one another because they work in different disciplines.

“You have two parallel universes — economists and others,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley... To economists, it is obvious that if the cost of an activity rises, the amount of the activity will drop. “To say anything else is to brand yourself an imbecile,” said Professor Wolfers, an author of the Stanford Law Review article criticizing the death penalty studies.

To many economists, then, it follows inexorably that there will be fewer murders as the likelihood of execution rises.

“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.”

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. ...

Critics say the larger factors are impossible to disentangle from whatever effects executions may have. They add that the new studies’ conclusions are skewed by data from a few anomalous jurisdictions, notably Texas, and by a failure to distinguish among various kinds of homicide.

There is also a classic economics question lurking in the background, Professor Wolfers said. “Capital punishment is very expensive,” he said, “so if you choose to spend money on capital punishment you are choosing not to spend it somewhere else, like policing.”

A single capital litigation can cost more than $1 million. It is at least possible that devoting that money to crime prevention would prevent more murders than whatever number, if any, an execution would deter.

The recent studies are, some independent observers say, of good quality, given the limitations of the available data. “These are sophisticated econometricians who know how to do multiple regression analysis at a pretty high level,” Professor Weisberg of Stanford said. The economics studies are, moreover, typically published in peer-reviewed journals, while critiques tend to appear in law reviews edited by students.

The available data is nevertheless thin, mostly because there are so few executions. ... “It seems unlikely,” Professor Donohue and Professor Wolfers concluded in their Stanford article, “that any study based only on recent U.S. data can find a reliable link between homicide and execution rates.”

The two professors offered one particularly compelling comparison. Canada has executed no one since 1962. Yet the murder rates in the United States and Canada have moved in close parallel since then, including before, during and after the four-year death penalty moratorium in the United States in the 1970s. ...

Professor Wolfers said the answer to the question of whether the death penalty deterred was “not unknowable in the abstract,” given enough data. “If I was allowed 1,000 executions and 1,000 exonerations, and I was allowed to do it in a random, focused way,” he said, “I could probably give you an answer.”

Update: PGL says in comments that "this type of research was labeled junk science by Dr. Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia Law School."  See PGL's post at EconoSpeak for more.

Comments

[Bernard Yomtov]

There is also a classic economics question lurking in the background, Professor Wolfers said. “Capital punishment is very expensive,” he said, “so if you choose to spend money on capital punishment you are choosing not to spend it somewhere else, like policing.”

A critical point, I think. Besides, the extra money spent on policing would reduce non-capital crime as well.

I myself am not an absolute opponent of capital punishment, but I think it should be restricted to the worst cases, with the most convincing evidence. Another way of saying this is that I think the Nazi war criminals deserved to be hanged, as some were, but that execution should be reserved for that sort of extreme case. A more recent example would be Timothy McVeigh.

[pgl]

Mark - this type of research was labeled junk science by Dr. Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia Law School. Discussion and links over at EconoSpeak including a link to Ed Leamer's Let's Take the Con Out of Econometrics.

[Alan]

It is worth recalling that the general deterrence argument sought to be tested by these studies does not depend on the actual guilt of the person executed. Executing an innocent person can have the same deterrent effect as executing a guilty one (this may depend on whether the public can be led to believe the executed person is guilty, but that is hard to test). The irrelevance of actual guilt is true of any punishment for the purpose of deterrence, but capital punishment is obviously irremediable.

[run75441]

Being confined to an area 82 square feet for natural life with an opportunity of outside exercise but 4 hours a day is a living hell for most people who are aware of their surroundings. Those who are not aware of their surrounding have been confined to the wrong institute and should be removed to places which will care for their needs. Yet many of the prisoners in the prison system have this to look forward to the rest of their lives until death takes them or as many do, they commit suicide. Life in a level 4 prison is not easy and it gets harder the higher the level.

In our society, there are those who would seek to snuff out the lives of those who commit murder seeking the final retribution against aggressors. In many, or most, cases; this is exactly what the prisoner seeks in order to be set free from constant confinement. The enlightened society, the US, the symbol of freedom, stands amongst these violators of freedom in practicing the ultimate in violations . . . the death penalty. We stand amongst such places as China, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and Sudan for retribution death sentences.

October 10th, 2007 was the worldwide Day Against the Death Penalty. "This event was launched by the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty, which gathers international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), Bar Associations, Unions and local governments from all over the world. Established by organizations who participated in the first international Congress against the death penalty (Strasbourg, 2001), the Coalition aims at encouraging the establishment of national coalitions, the organization of common initiatives and the coordination of international lobbying efforts to sensitize states that still maintain the death penalty."

37 states offer some form of the death penalty, the most popular being Lethal Injection followed by Electrocution, Gas Chamber, Hanging and Shooting. None are guaranteed as effective in accomplishing the task as shown here: www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?scid=8&did=478 "Botched Executions." Take a moment and read and understand that none of these death sentences have done anything to reduce statistically the amount of Violence taking place in the US today. We have only touched upon convictions and not those convicted and still innocent which run as high as 9% (forget Marquis and Scalia). The issue with murderers is psychological and we have yet to recognize the psyche of the murder and how they envision themselves. Inward lies a hatred for self with the only way forward is seeking the punishment of others. If truly one were seeking punishment, confinement for natural life is the ultimate answer as opposed to releasing them through death.

It has been estimated that the cost of the death penalty is in the $millions due to the appeals and the legal process leading up to that day. This supersedes the cost of confinement. In New Jersey there were ~197 capital cases from 1983 to 2006 of which 60 convictions were obtained and sentenced to death. 50 convictions were reversed and the cost, the cost was an easy 253 million dollars for all. The average cost of incarceration is ~$30,000/year. The economics favors incarceration as well as the punishment of living as a caged animal.

The Supreme Court is taking up Lethal Injections for constitutionally as unreasonable punishment. If you have read the cases presented, you know there are serious issues with that being used for lethal injection.

- Barbiturates are injected into the person to anesthetize them. This in itself could be the delivering blow to life if delivered in a massive dose. Prison officials do not want to subject the witnesses and executioner to 30 minutes of waiting for death.

- Pancuronium bromide is injected as a paralytic agent to keep the prisoner from twitching. It is not needed to cause death. It also makes it harder to tell if the prisoner is sufficiently anesthetized and in pain from the final dose.

- Potassium Chloride is administered which causes a painful cardiac arrest if the prisoner is not sufficiently anesthetized. Dogs are no longer put to sleep using this method as it is painful. No precautions are taken to assure a prisoner is sufficiently anesthetized and much is done to prevent knowing such.

"Your procedure would be prohibited if applied to cats and dogs," Justice John Paul Stevens told a lawyer arguing for Florida.

[ken melvin]

Why do states such as Texas have such high murder rates? Seems maybe 'tis a positive feedback instead of negative.

[2slugbaits]

What about perverse incentives? Wasn't it Ted Bundy who decided to commit murders in Florida because Florida had the death penalty and used it often. Quite the tourism slogan, huh: "Nine out of ten serial murderers prefer Florida because we have Old Sparky!" Really makes you want to raise your kids there.

[James Killus]

Whether or not the death penalty is a deterrent is almost completely irrelevant to its advocates. What is important to them is the fantasy of power over transgressors.

It would be much more enlightening to see a study of the correlation between advocacy of the death penalty and advocacy of torture (along with the denial that various torture techniques are actually "torture"). I predict that the correlation is quite high, for the reason I noted above.

The idea that it follows from economic theory that the death penalty deters crime is also poorly thought out. To get the same result, all you need do is believe that more effort will be expended on circumventing the law, not less criminal activity. Do economists really believe that high taxes lead to less effort in acquiring money, rather than more effort in evading taxes?

I will note, however, that there the death penalty has a very real deterrence effect that has been well documented: the threat of the death penalty has often been used to force accuses persons to plea bargain to lesser crimes. There are many documented cases of this situation involving innocent people. That also is a perfectly ordinary result of classical economics and game theory. Those fantasists I referred to at the beginning of this post also do not think this is a bad thing, as "they must have done something criminal, otherwise they would not have run afoul of the law."

[ken melvin]

Haven't gotten to the point of realizing that revenge makes them just as bad those who did the crime.

[calmo]

Dang Killus's What is important to them is the fantasy of power over transgressors. is hangably good, no? Capital punishment...that'll teach em.
I'm sure those economists that favor capital punishment for police killings would also like to extend it to the killing of economists...in fact any spitball shootin detractors...order in the classroom has suffered enough.

Last thing: "disentangled from" occurs in this piece more than once...of course "entanglement" in physics would only mess with the messupables like me...unlike run75441 who provides real detail, thank you.

[John H. Morrison]

An article appeared several years ago in "The Skeptical Inquirer" alleging that econometric analysis of the effect of the death penalty involved such idiocies as fitting grossly non-linear data to a line. The original Ehrlich study is the only one that I am familiar with, and it was as bad as the famous Laffer curve from the Wall Street Journal last July. He used logarithms of the numbers of executions; consequently is results were determined by the last five years of his time period, during which only ten executions took place.

Logarithms strongly emphasize lower numbers, and the numbers of executions were lowest right at the end of his time period, 1969. They also just happened to occur as the murder rate was rising rapidly. Bowers & Pierce redid the analysis, using both logarithms and straight values, and also varying the time intervals used. The straight values always returned a positive correlation between the death penalty and murder rate. Ehrlich's negative correlation (based on logarithms) was strongly sensitive to the final year.

I have no problem with econometrics in principle -- statistical analysis to compare and correlate the effects of executions, unemployment, etc. on the murder rate. It simply has to be done competently. The Ehrlich study was a masterpiece in incompetence.

[philip]

Interesting there was no mention of justice in anyone's discussions. Is there no "death is the just penalty" argument at all? I suppose it all gets lumped into the vengance category by the "enlightened".

[calmo]

But philip, lets review this...together.
Mark sets it up.
There is this argument...For Capital Punishment.
And then, not to mis-direct the discussion in any way, there is The Denunciation...not to be taken as merely a pyschological remark from specimen, Mark Thoma.
Period.
You figure we should discuss The Bed of Nails? Public Flogging? Drawing and Quartering?...some alternative to "death"...Can we overcome the adolescent ways of our benighted past and grow up...and recognize that the difference between these savages and us is that we have this preference for order and decorum...so long as we are in the director's chair.

[James Killus]

Ah, I see that in addition to wondering whether or not "torture" is torture, we must also worry about whether one is "enlightened" or enlightened.

Guillotine! Guillotine! We must bring back that marvelous engine.

[ndd]

What complete rubbish! One of the reasons I turned away from grad school economics was a fellow student (with a famous patrimony) who was -- seriously -- working on a paper advocating the use of torture as punishment because it "increased the cost" of crime. This was apparently viewed as a completely acceptable application of economic analysis.

Of course, since econ 101 tells you all you need to know about human behavior, there's no need to take a walk over the the psychology department where they will tell you that two important variables affecting the learning of behavior are (1) the certainty of the (positive or negative) reinforcement, and (2) the time interval between the behavior and the reinforcement. Since among other things (1) the death penalty is never uniformly applied (to those murders which are solved in the first place), and (2) the trial takes place many months, and the execution many years after the offensive behavior is commited, there is very little likelihood of any behavior being learned.

[Brooks]

These studies aside, I suggest two good starting points (one for opponents of the death penalty, one for proponents) for exploration/discussion of the issue.

1) Question for proponents: Hypothetically, JUST ARGUENDO, let’s presume there is zero deterrent effect. Would you still favor it and why?

One rationale that is offered for still favoring it even if there were zero deterrent effect is justice for its own sake – that the murderer “deserved” it. This rationale, in itself, is invalid because free will is an illusion, so no one “deserves” anything, but that’s a tough one for most people to grasp. If they are referring not to some inherent benefit and merit of justice itself, but rather to the emotional benefit of others feeling satisfied that justice is being done and a bad person is getting what he “deserves” (per their thinking), then that is at least something real, but the question still remains of why it would be moral to inflict so much emotional (and possibly even physical) pain on the murderer and his family (leaving aside the possibility that he’s actually innocent) simply for the irrationally-based emotional benefit of others (“irrationally-based”, because, again, there is no free will so no one “deserves” punishment).

2) Question for opponents: Hypothetically, JUST ARGUENDO, let’s presume that the death penalty is a very effective deterrent and a very cost-effective tactic in reducing murders (and other relevant crimes), and that there is an infinitesimal chance of executing an innocent person. Would you still oppose it and why? And why would you oppose it and not oppose life imprisonment?

[pgl]

Brooks. If #2 were true (it's false on both counts), I'd still opposed capital punishment. Our host said he'd oppose it too. Proponents favor it for their own reasons - they like state sactioned revenge. I don't.

[Brooks]

pgl,

ok, but if you oppose "state-sanctioned revenge", then:

1) Do you oppose punitive damages being awarded in lawsuits?

2) Do you oppose prison sentences that only remove the convicted person for a short time period (and therefore cannot be justified only on the basis of physicaly preventing that person from committing further crime via imprisonment)? If not, how is such imprisonment not "state-sanctioned revenge"?

[Brooks]

Also pgl,

If, just arguendo, the death penalty were a deterrent and a cost-effective means of reducing murder and other relevant crimes, than it would not by merely "revenge" or perhaps not for the purpose of revenge at all.

[robertdfeinman]

Following the freakonomics logic on legal abortion leading to less crime later (because legal abortion leads to fewer births among the "undesirables" who can't afford illegal abortions) we should move on to demographic based population control.

Those who fall into the category of having children with a higher chance of committing crimes should not be allowed to reproduce. I can even supply an economic argument for it, if needed.

I think the Nazis used this approach. Sometimes when human ethics and market "efficiency" conflict one needs to adopt the ethical choices. Perhaps economists need to take a course in ethics as many medical schools now require.

Another question is why is the US so blood thirsty? We engage in the most wars, we have the largest prison population, we have the harshest punishments and the lowest regard for rehabilitation. Has this increased recently or has it always been this way? The treatment of the Indians and the slaves would seem to indicate it's part of the American psyche? If so, why?

[philip]

Calmo,
Perhaps it is your unusual punctuation, perhaps it is your fractured sentences, but I cannot make sense of your response.

Brooks,
If you believe free will is an illusion, then why do you bother with discussion? Or, actually I suppose you have no choice but to discuss. Or, whenever your eyes are forced to see words that your brain is forced to not like you are forced to respond. It must suck to be dragged along as a volitionless spectator on such an obnoxious journey.

I personally believe in free will and I also believe in justice. I also believe in rehabilitation after justice has been served. However, some crimes needle the justice meter. Then you must die. Sometimes it costs more to serve justice than to do nothing. I would actually think that is pretty much always the case. But that is not a valid argument against justice.

[calmo]

Fractured?
Well.
Thank you, philip.
The devil makes me ask (otherwise I, too, have free will): Iz this what they used to call a run-on sentence?Perhaps it is your unusual punctuation, perhaps it is your fractured sentences, but I cannot make sense of your response.But I get the overall picture that your taste for fracture of any sort is on the rise...mine too, following real Olympians like paine...who I'll limp after as long as I can type, you?
Here tiz the Thoma position: buzz off with ANY moral argument for Capital Punishment. If you are otherwise aligned, no amount of arguing, no econometric study, no philosophical bethumpery, is going to change the pre-emptive Thoma position...that Capital Punishment is just BAD.
I like Mark's variation on the Python '5 or 10 minute Argument'...for him, microseconds, but for us...dang, we can spin this for days...you'll see.

[Brooks]

Philip,

Without a doubt, free will is indeed an illusion. For an explanation, see my comments in this discussion of free will I am "B Rational". I did not write the diary, so scroll down for my initial comment for a clear, simple explanation of why free will is an impossibility.

[Brooks]

Philip,
I forgot to reiterate that the implication of the absence of free will is that there is really no such thing as "deserving" some punishment (or reward) in the sense of justice. As a practical matter, we have to put that truth aside and punish/reward based on the corresponding illusion of merit, but the truth is that we deserve no real credit or blame for anything we do, because we have exactly zero free will.

[ken melvin]

I believe in god and senator dodd and the tooth fairy, but not necessarily in that order nor all at the same time.

[John M 307]

I would be perfectly happy if the death penalty were abolished. But it's not going to happen in the ordinary course of events -- perhaps if major participants in the death penalty are seriously hurt. I think that various tactics should be used to fight the death penalty. As one tactic, a few of us should try to get the death penalty applied in situations that easily merit the death penalty but never get it.

Here are examples, that I will put in the form of questions to a death-penalty proponent:

"As anyone been executed for the frame-up and wrongful execution of Odell Barnes?"

"How many participants in the death-squad terror-training School of the Americas have been executed?"

"What's the appropriate punishment for aggressive war?"

"How many times has Colonel North been executed?"

[David in NY]

I have often seen the argument for the death penalty phrased in the terms, "Well, if you imagine someone contemplating committing a murder, and he thinks, 'But there's a death penalty, and if I do, I might be killed, and decides not to commit the crime.'" I've never seen somebody address the question whether such a person is more likely to refrain in those circumstances than if he thinks, "But if I'm caught I will spend the rest of my life in jail!" I personally can't imagine there's any difference between the two, even in the extraordinary case where such an analysis happens. The pro-death penalty argument makes no sense.

[James Killus]

David in NY,

The death penalty makes the same sense as the criminalization of abortion: it gives its proponents the illusion of the power of life and death over their fellows.

If, however, by "makes no sense" you mean that you prefer reality to illusion, I'm with you.

[german_reader]

Even the idea that the death penalty could have any positive effect on murder rates or crime rates in general is ridiculous. The murder rate in the US is four to five times higher than in nearly all other developed nations ( Finland is number two with half the murder rate of the US ). It incarcerates seven times more people than other industrialized nations ( the only Western nation where imprisonment has an significant effect on the unemployment rate ). And punishments in the US are in many cases are much harsher than elsewhere ( The rule "three times and you're out " is a bad joke. Prison sentences are often much longer. The chance to land in prison is much higher... )

Nevertheless homicide and many other crime rates are much higher than nearly everywhere else in the Western world. The failure of the crime policy of the US is more than obvious. It's a complete and cruel aberration. And it's a shame for a nation which wants to set moral and political standards for the rest of the world.

A crime policy which uses unnecessary violence and cruelty to fight against crime is in the moral sense not better than the criminals it persecutes. Revenge, the poor desire to punish are inferior impulses hardly appropriate to establish a morally superior policy.

And perhaps most important: It doesn't protect those who are used as a justification for the death penalty and other excess penalties: The innocent, the victims. Other nations with much more human crime policies are much more successful in protecting the potential victims. You don't need to be barbarous to create a safe society. The US law system is characterized by a disparity of means in regard to the penalties and indifference against the victims. Better and more human ways to prevent crime are proved and available as experiences from many other nations show.

The problem seems to be that this would presume the understanding that crime and other individual failures are often not only the result of personal deficits but also of surrounding social conditions. Society has often a co-responsibility for many misbehaviours of individuals.

And it's no surprise that a society which is based more on individual competition, confrontation and social exclusion creates more aggression and crime than societies which rest ( more ) upon social cooperation, partnership and integration. Introducing a better crime policy for the US would not only mean to abolish the death penalty. It also would mean to re-design major parts of the economical, social and political system of the US.

[ken melvin]

Dear german_reader,

I sometimes think individualism translates to ignorance.

[TigerPaw]

If execution made a society safer then the safest place in the world would be the US. Clearly it isn't and by a significant margin.

That pretty much says it all. All it's about is revenge. Nothing more, nothing less.

[Peter Schaeffer]

I note here all manner of offence at the alleged injustice of the death penalty… And not the slightest tinge of upset, much less outrage over the crimes that put these people on death row…

I question the morality of burying 3 to 18 innocent people to save the life of a vile criminal. Obviously a minority viewpoint.

[ndd]

To Peter Schaffer:

For the record, I have no problem with the death penalty, provided the evidence is overwhelming and multi-sourced, as opposed to resting on unreliable evidence such as eyewitness identifications.
That being said:

I question the morality of burying 3 to 18 innocent people to save the life of a vile criminal. Obviously a minority viewpoint.

Since the primary thrust of the blog item and many responses, such as mine, is that the paper claiming such a deterrent effect is utter crap, crap which you uncritically parrot in your comment, you have resolved the hitherto open question: you are a troll.

[german_reader]

@Peter Schaeffer

reacting to a crime with another crime, the superfluous and unneccessary killing of a person, doesn't build a safer society. There are absolutely no proves that the death penalty saves lives. More the opposite. It's a cheap excuse for not addressing those items which really could make the US a safer place. Stricter weapon laws, better social conditions for the poor, less inequality and social exclusion, a fairer society which gives all citizens a realistic chance to participate and improve their lives ( don't tell me the American blacks have equal opportunities ).

Capital punishment is a cheap way for the majority to deny their co-responsibility for some kinds crimes. Not every murder is a pathologically ill person. Many homicides occur under certain social conditions. And as we know from war times nearly everyone can be a murder. It's the responsibility of a society to avoid social conditions which lead to abnormally high crime levels. And poverty, discrimination, social exclusion or a society which celebrates weapons and the violent solution of conflicts are such conditions.

In my view the death penalty or public court hearings in the US have the same function as "panem et circenses" in old Rome: distract the public from the real problems.

[btgraff]

in answer to brooks question, in both instances, proponents/opponents would raise the issue of the friends and family of the victim or the murder...

proponents would argue that instituting the death penalty gives some sense of "closure" to the family of the victim - that the murderer is no longer alive and enjoying life when the victim is dead - that this provides some sense of justice. of course, some friends and family of victims are horrified by the death penalty because of their moral views about killing of any kind.

same goes for the opposite case - the person on death row also has friends and family, and if your loved one is killed by the sate, you too suffer during the trial, the period before the execution, and afterwards. there is also the moral argument that if killing is so terrible, the state itself should not kill except in cases of self defense.

i oppose the death penalty in large part because it is not reversible and the justice system in even the best countries is far from perfect - there was a 60 minutes piece on the weekend about FBI expert testimony on forensics involving bullets.

that being said, i also think that when faced with someone who committed genocide, or whose continuing life in prison still puts society at risk in some way (a cult leader or leader of a government or other armed group, someone who has killed a prison guard while serving a life sentence, etc.). had hitler been caught alive, he should have been tried and killed along with the others at nuremberg.

[Peter Schaeffer]

Ndd,

At least three points come to mind.

1. Any number of posters (apparently not including you) have stated their absolute opposition to the death penalty, even if it was proven to their satisfaction that it saved lives. Hence the relevance of my statement “I question the morality of burying 3 to 18 innocent people to save the life of a vile criminal”.

2. There is no one paper demonstrating the deterrent value of the death penalty. The NYT article lists seven papers (see below), not all in agreement on the subject. However, I haven’t see any serious attempt to refute the deterrence claims (in some of the papers) by the posters above.

The arguments amount to “Florida is hot, Florida has more air conditioners, air conditioners make Florida hot”. When Republicans use similar arguments to “prove” that the 2003 tax cuts raised revenues, the response here is seldom charitable. However, when similarly shallow thinking is used to evaluate the deterrence value of the death penalty, it is OK.

By now, I would have assumed that everyone was aware of the causation correlation fallacy. I guess not.

3. I would be the last to argue that even peer-reviewed economic papers published in mainstream journals are always correct in their methodology or conclusions. However, to refer to these papers as “crap” and presume that a four letter word suffices as a rejoinder is hardly an adequate response.

For everyone’s benefit I have listed the papers in the NYT article below with their URL’s.

IS CAPITAL PUNISHMENT MORALLY REQUIRED? ACTS, OMISSIONS, AND LIFELIFE TRADEOFFS (http://www.stanford.edu/group/lawreview/content/vol58/issue3/sunstein1.pdf)

Getting Off Death Row: Commuted Sentences and the
Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment (http://econ.cudenver.edu/mocan/papers/GettingOffDeathRow.pdf)

USES AND ABUSES OF EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE IN THE DEATH PENALTY DEBATE (http://www.stanford.edu/group/lawreview/content/vol58/issue3/donohue.pdf)

Does Capital Punishment Have a Deterrent Effect? New Evidence from Post-moratorium Panel Data (http://www.cjlf.org/deathpenalty/DezRubShepDeterFinal.pdf)

DETERRENCE VERSUS BRUTALIZATION: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT’S DIFFERING IMPACTS AMONG STATES (http://www.michiganlawreview.org/archive/104/2/Shepherd.pdf)

Prison Conditions, Capital Punishment, and Deterrence
(http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/katz/papers/kls_aler.pdf)

Capital Punishment and Capital Murder: Market Share and the Deterrent Effects of the Death Penalty
(http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=928649)

[Peter Schaeffer]

Bernard Yomtov,

Assuming the death penalty does save 3-18 lives per execution, then capital punishment should be views as highly profitable. A prior article here at EV (“What's Life Worth?” - http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/06/whats_life_wort.html) gave human life values in the range of $4 – 7 million dollars. Allowing for $1 million total cost per execution, that implies gains of $11 - $125 million per capital sentence carried out.

[Syaloch]

I'm with Phillip in that I have no problem with the concept of a death penalty as a way to serve justice. Some crimes deserve it. However, I oppose it in practice because it is applied unfairly. The fact that quite a few people that have been put to death have subsequently been shown to be innocent is enough to make it unacceptable to me.

And Brooks, sorry, but it's not at all obvious that there's no free will. I looked at your discussion and it seems that you like to use a very particular definition of free will that assumes your position. Also, you are confusing conceptual realms -- it's like saying there's no classical mechanics because quantum mechanics operates by different rules.

But that's waaaaay off topic for this thread.

[Peter Schaeffer]

Syaloch,

Your statement

“The fact that quite a few people that have been put to death have subsequently been shown to be innocent is enough to make it unacceptable to me.”

Is contrafactual. Check out CBS News “Va.: DNA Confirms Executed Man's Guilt New Test Proves Roger Keith Coleman Was Guilty Of Rape, Murder” (http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/01/12/national/main1205921.shtml). A useful quote

“(CBS/AP) New DNA tests confirmed the guilt of a man who went to his death in Virginia's electric chair in 1992 proclaiming his innocence, the governor said Thursday.

The case had been closely watched by both sides in the death penalty debate because no executed convict in the United States has ever been exonerated by scientific testing.”

[Syaloch]

Peter Schaeffer:

You're right, my recall was incorrect. What I was thinking of was the number of people released from death row on evidence of their innocence, as described here. Thanks for the correction.

[Patricia Shannon]

How typical. The same people who say we should believe statistics involving a few people, to support the death penalty, reject the use of statistics, involving many more people, that show that countries and states that have the death penalty have a higher rate of violent crime, including murder.

I guess the only thing that keeps them from being murderers is the death penalty, so they assume it applies to everyone.

2slugbaits says...
What about perverse incentives? Wasn't it Ted Bundy who decided to commit murders in Florida because Florida had the death penalty and used it often. Quite the tourism slogan, huh: "Nine out of ten serial murderers prefer Florida because we have Old Sparky!" Really makes you want to raise your kids there.

I read an article where a social worker pointed out that the death penalty made murder more attractive to gang members, because it makes it more dangerous, thus more exciting. If fear of death were a universal deterrent, nobody would race cars, climb Mt. Everest, etc.

German_reader has did a good job of covering most of the relevant ground.

If the death penalty has a short-term deterrent effect, and a long-term enhancing effect on murders that is as great or greater, where is the gain?

One point I never see mentioned is the damage done to our own psyches by the death penalty. Every time I have heard of an execution, I have felt in myself a lessening of reverence for life. For the state to use the death penalty sends the message to our citizens that it is acceptable to kill people if it results in a gain to ourselves.

[Patricia Shannon]

Peter Schaeffer says...
“The fact that quite a few people that have been put to death have subsequently been shown to be innocent is enough to make it unacceptable to me.”
...
The case had been closely watched by both sides in the death penalty debate because no executed convict in the United States has ever been exonerated by scientific testing.”

Maybe you didn't notice the careful wording "exonerated by scientific testing.” There was at least one case, maybe in the 1880's, where a man was executed for a murder, where the body was not found, where the supposed victim later turned up alive. I need to get back to work, but will try to do some research on this if nobody else does so first.

[Brooks]

Syaloch,
Unless I'm misunderstanding to what you were referring, you say that that a discussion of free will is "waaaaay off topic for this thread" (and you may be right; it may be too tangential or may be sufficiently relevant), yet you critique my argument (poorly and erroneously). There seems to be some incongruity between the two. I'll assume that it is too tangential and stop here unless someone else comments further on it. I would, however, encourage you to debate me on that other site if you think you've got such a strong argument.

[Syaloch]

Brooks,

I mention free will only because of your own attempt to tie it to the death penalty discussion. This does not seem to be an appropriate place for a discussion of free will, but the boldness of your assertion, coupled with your attitude of having reached a lofty philosophic plateau far beyond most people's comprehension, was so silly that it begged some sort of response.

Whether free will exists in some abstract-Platonic or molecular-deterministic sense is quite beside the point. For all practical purposes, humans can be treated as if they had free will. Once we start allowing the "Prior mental states made me do it!" argument in court, we're in big trouble.

As for the philosophical aspects, I love nothing better than do debate such matters. But I can already see from the other discussions both here and on the other site to know how you would respond, so I don't really see the point.

[MiC]

Looking over the study, I really question how robust it is as fundamental regression assumptions appear to be violated by the data set. The number of executions is not exogenous to the homicide rate. A perception of a high homicide rate leads to more aggressive capital punishment laws. This relationship also creates a serious time series issue that I think is hard to correct for. If the delay between offense and execution is on the same frequency as crime fluctuations, multiple regression is not going to be able to disentangle that relationship.

The more important finding of the study is that the "prisoners per violent crime" is strongly statistically significant and while the study does cover this, this statistic responds much faster to changes in public policy than executions since the legal process means a long time from conviction to execution. It also makes intuitive sense that locking up up violent criminals reduces crime.

My thinking is that the society is not willing to spend more on criminal justice than it does. We'd be so much better ending the failed, pointless war on drugs and instead using those funds to do a better job of convicting violent offenders and locking them up longer. But just as with capital punishment, the war on drugs is driven by emotion rather than reason and so I doubt we see substantial public policy shifts in either one.

[richard]

I seem to recall that one set of statistics are similar across countries: the proportion of murder vicitims that know their assailant is on the order of 80%, and the majority of those are family members. Arguments (especially drug and liquer fueled ones) dominate causal factors relating to murder. Intuitively, I wouldn't imagine that murders involving family members would be all that amenable to negative incentives when fueled by emotion and drugs.

[Peter Schaeffer]

Richard,

"I seem to recall that one set of statistics are similar across countries: the proportion of murder vicitims that know their assailant is on the order of 80%, and the majority of those are family members."

From “Death by Murder” (http://www.benbest.com/lifeext/murder.html#usa)

"In the early 1960s the vast majority of murder victims were acquainted with the murderer, but by the year 2000 nearly half of murder victims were strangers."

I have not found a separate source to corroborate this claim. Nor have I found any contrary data. The confounding factor is that in roughly half of current murders the relationship between the killer and victim is “unknown”.

[Peter Schaeffer]

MiC,

Which study did you look at? There were several (seven listed, a dozen mentioned). However, I do give you credit for looking at the actual studies rather than relying on causation/correlation fallacies.

[MiC]

I looked at the one linked from the NYT article by Mocan and Gittings:

http://econ.cudenver.edu/mocan/papers/GettingOffDeathRow.pdf

[Peter Schaeffer]

Syaloch,

It is quite true that a number of people have been exonerated using DNA evidence. However, what is less know is that considerably more death row inmates have been condemned by DNA data found after their convictions.

See “Acknowledging Guilt: Forcing Self-Identification in Post-Conviction DNA Testing” (http://law.bepress.com/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1891&context=alea) for a paper on the subject. See also “Proven guilty: an examination of the penalty-free world of post-conviction DNA testing” (http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-6750463/Proven-guilty-an-examination-of.html).

It is worth noting that the number of post-conviction DNA based exonerations has been small. According to the “Innocence Project”, the total is 208 so far. 15 were capital cases.

[Patricia Shannon]

I don't see that finding that most prisoners are guilty says much, unless you believe that the government is locking up mostly innocent people, which I don't expect is a common view in this country. In respect to the death penalty, it is the fact that numerous innocent people were found guilty that is the problem.

[Syaloch]

Peter Schaeffer:

It is worth noting that the number of post-conviction DNA based exonerations has been small.

The fact that the number is greater than zero is one of the factors that leads me to oppose the death penalty in practice. Knowing that even one innocent person was put to death for a crime they did not commit is to horrible for me to contemplate.

There are a number of other factors as well, such as evidence of racial bias, arbitrainess, and inconsistency of representation.

[Peter Schaeffer]

Patricia Shannon and others,

I have stated several times that simplistic causation/correlation analysis don’t amount to much. However, it is a game anyone can play.

For example, the two states with the lowest 2006 murder rates were New Hampshire and South Dakota. Both are death penalty states. By contrast, Michigan does not have a death penalty. Its murder rate is 7 times higher.

Of course, Michigan is a long way away from New Hampshire and South Dakota. However, Minnesota is next to South Dakota and doesn’t have a death penalty. Its murder rate is 2X SD. Vermont is rather near New Hampshire and doesn’t have a death penalty. VT’s murder rate is 1.9X that of New Hampshire.

Internationally the data is similar. Japan and China both employ the death penalty and have very low homicide rates. Venezuela and South Africa are world leaders in murder and don’t have a death penalty. Mexico doesn’t have a death penalty and the murder rate is 2X the US. Of course, Venezuela is 7X the United States.

Looking at the US over time, a similar pattern emerges. See More Executions, Fewer Murders. After the death penalty was de facto abolished in the 1960s the murder rate soared (as did all crime rates). When the death penalty was restored after 1980, the murder rate plunged (with a lag).

Predictably, statistical analysis of this data shows an astounding life saving from each execution. A quote from “USES AND ABUSES OF EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE IN THE DEATH PENALTY DEBATE”

“Most recently, Dezhbakhsh and Shepherd have analyzed national timeseries data from 1960 to 2000. In light of Figure 1, it is not surprising that they find a strong negative relationship between executions and the homicide rate.33 While they do not report their results in terms of lives saved per execution, their estimates suggest that each execution reduces the homicide rate by about 0.05 homicides per 100,000 people, which translates to around 150 (!) fewer homicides per execution.”

Note that the authors of the above paper do not agree with this conclusion. Nor do Dezhbakhsh and Sheperd who use a lower number of 18.5 lives saved per execution.

The point here is that simplistic comparisons of states and/or countries, with and without the death penalty won’t prove much. Nor would I attach much significance to death row bravado from gang members. If the US was swiftly executing gang bangers at an appreciable rate, such comments might have meaning. Under the current circumstances, it’s just one more way these criminals express their contempt for a society unwilling to justly punish them.

See http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?did=169#MRord and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homicide_rate and
http://www.benbest.com/lifeext/murder.html#usa for the original data.

[MiC]

Of course, Michigan is a long way away from New Hampshire and South Dakota. However, Minnesota is next to South Dakota and doesn’t have a death penalty. Its murder rate is 2X SD. Vermont is rather near New Hampshire and doesn’t have a death penalty. VT’s murder rate is 1.9X that of New Hampshire.

This reasoning is completely statistically invalid. The Mocan and Gittings study is shows urbanization to be major factor in the murder rate. Urbanization is still significant a 1% level where executions is only significant at the 5% level. Comparing murder rates in states with large urban centers like Michigan or Minnesota to South Dakota is a completely misleading and bogus exercise.

[Peter Schaeffer]

Syaloch,

As I pointed out earlier, there isn’t a single modern case of an executed criminal who was later proven innocent. However, let’s assume there was. What exactly is your point? Innocent people die all of the time. Many are murdered. If the death penalty deters murder, your unwillingness to execute killers because of the possibility of error, leads to the surety of innocent life lost. That’s not an acceptable tradeoff, at least to me.

What you are really saying is that murder of innocents is somehow less important than the possibility that the government might make a mistake.

I looked at your “racial bias” data. Did you? Whites account for 57% of all executions but only 45.3% of death row inmates.

[Patricia Shannon]

So it's ok for the government to kill innocent people? Some of the people who have been proved innocent were on death row, and came close to being executed, and were only saved because of some law students started studying the issue. Do you really expect us to believe that such miscarriages never happened before the studies started, and never happened to anybody who didn't happen to be in one of the studies. That seems farfetched, to put it politely.

[german_reader]

@Peter Schaeffer

the always same ugly game with numbers. I can play it as well. For example look here:

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?did=169

13 out of 50 US states have no capital punishment. How do they compare to states with death penalty? Not that bad.

Among the ten US states with the lowest homicide rates five have no death penalty, among the the twenty states with the lowest rates nine do not use capital punishment ( remember of 13 ). On the other hand of the twenty states with the highest homicide rates nineteen ( ! ) execute the death penalty and only one - Michigan, rank 9 - has no capital punishment.

And Michigan , as far as I know, is one of the US states with large urban areas which is most troubled with declining industries, high unemployment and high poverty rates. Detroit is the poorest ( ? ) large city in the US. All conditions which extremely favor crime.

The average homicide rate for states with capital punishment is 7.1 per 100,000 inhabitants, while it's 3.9 per 100,000 for states without death penalty ( hope I made no miscalculation, lots of numbers ).

Similar results on the international level. In Canada the homicide rate fell after the abolition of the death penalty:

"Recent crime figures from abolitionist countries fail to show that abolition has harmful effects. In Canada, for example, the homicide rate per 100,000 population fell from a peak of 3.09 in 1975, the year before the abolition of the death penalty for murder, to 2.41 in 1980, and since then it has declined further. In 2006, 30 years after abolition, the homicide rate was 1.85 per 100,000 population, 40 per cent lower than in 1975 and the second lowest rate in three decades."

http://web.amnesty.org/pages/deathpenalty-facts-eng

Homicide rates in most EU countries ( capital punishment is abolished in the EU ) are between 1-2 persons per 100,000 compared to 5.5 in the US. Of the thirty states with the lowest homicide rates worldwide a clear majority has no death penalty ( Exceptions are Japan, Saudi-Arabia, Qatar or Indonesia, most of them closed societies with very homogenous populations. ).

It's true some nations with capital punishment have low homicide rates. But only very of them would be considered as free societies which guarantee the same level of indivdual liberties as Western democracies. Americans must decide, if they want to follow Iran, Saudi-Arabia and Indonesia or France, Canada and Sweden. I'd know my choice!

[reason]

I'm inclined to think MiC has it right. High murder rates increases both the level of policing and the number of death sentences and imprisonments => cyclically decreasing murder rates by the time the executions are carried out.

Where Peter Schaeffer's argument is wrong of course is in ignoring that other policies are MUCH more effective than the expensive and morally questionable death penalty in reducing the murder rate and one must wonder why he isn't concentrating his effort there.

[reason]

Ken Melvin 3:33 pm - entertaining comment, but I wonder what the relevance was.

[Syaloch]

Peter Schaeffer,

As I pointed out earlier, there isn’t a single modern case of an executed criminal who was later proven innocent.

You seem to be hiding behind behind the word "proven" here. Courts generally don't expend a lot of effort investigating claims of innocence when the defendant is dead. Nevertheless, there does appear to be strong evidence of of innocence in a number of cases. And we do know that people sentenced to death have been exonerated -- fortunately, at least in these cases, before the sentence was carried out.

As for the rest of your argument, whether the death penalty deters crime is debatable. Even if it does have some positive effect, that doesn't mean that killing everyone who might commit a violent crime in the future is the only or even the best means of deterrence. There are plenty of actions we could take that might deter some violent crime (recall the Freakonomics claim about abortion?), but that we can reasonably reject on other grounds.

As for the apparent racial bias in death penalty sentencing, I'm not sure why out of all the information I linked to, you cherry picked a single statistic of questionable relevance. Perhaps you are so intent on making your case that you're not looking at things objectively?

[Peter Schaeffer]

german_reader,

India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are all democracies. All have the death penalty. Euroelitism is not particularly attractive.

However, your reference to Canada is interesting. The 10 American states with the lowest murder rates (NH 1.0, SD, 1.2, ND 1.3, HI 1.6, WY 1.7, ME 1.7, MN 1.8, UT 1.8, IA 1.8, VT 1.9) all have homicide rates much lower than Canada. Yet, they are all demographically quite similar to Canada (save Hawaii) and of course have America’s social and economic system. Notably, all except for Hawaii are quite close to Canada.

This should tell you something. With comparable demographics, the US social and economic system produces much lower murder rates than Canada.

Of course, the same is true compared to Germany. US states with demographics comparable to Germany have murder rates equal to, or lower than Germany.

[Peter Schaeffer]

reason,

I covered the economic analysis earlier.

"Assuming the death penalty does save 3-18 lives per execution, then capital punishment should be views as highly profitable. A prior article here at EV (“What's Life Worth?” - http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2007/06/whats_life_wort.html) gave human life values in the range of $4 – 7 million dollars. Allowing for $1 million total cost per execution, that implies gains of $11 - $125 million per capital sentence carried out."

Returns ranging from 11:1 to 125:1 look good to me.

[reason]

Peter Schaeffer - you haven't shown that other alternative policies aren't even more cost effective!

[MiC]

PeterSchaffer,

The 10 American states with the lowest murder rates (NH 1.0, SD, 1.2, ND 1.3, HI 1.6, WY 1.7, ME 1.7, MN 1.8, UT 1.8, IA 1.8, VT 1.9) all have homicide rates much lower than Canada. ... With comparable demographics, the US social and economic system produces much lower murder rates than Canada.

I don't understand why you keep persisting in these bogus comparisons. The states you list with low murder rates are all predominately rural states. Urbanization increases the murder rate. Comparing areas where one has a large percentage urban population than the other is at best misleading.

Can you cite statistics to prove the demographics are similar to Canada? I doubt they are similar among the states. The most important factor is the % of the population 20-34. Young people commit more murders than old people.

You can't begin to prove anything about the US social-economic system without controlling for other factors.

[Peter Schaeffer]

MiC,

Just for fun I ran a regression of murder rates by state with percent urban (from the US census). Their is a positive correlation. However, the R2 is 0.0304. You need a new model. By the way a simple demographic regression produced an R2 of 0.6333.

I think you need to drop the urbanization theory of murder rates.

[David in NY]

See --
Exoneration Using DNA Brings Change in Legal System
By SOLOMON MOORE
Published: New York Times, October 1, 2007

In a 2007 study, Professor [Samuel R.] Gross [of the University of Michigan Law School] analyzed 3,792 death sentences imposed from 1973 to 1989 and found that 86 death row inmates, or 2.3 percent, had been exonerated through 2004.

[Brooks]

Syaloch,

Re: "Whether free will exists in some abstract-Platonic or molecular-deterministic sense is quite beside the point. For all practical purposes, humans can be treated as if they had free will. Once we start allowing the "Prior mental states made me do it!" argument in court, we're in big trouble."

You demonstrate that you not only have no (correct) idea of what "free will" is, but also can't distinguish between what the truth is and what premises are practical to act upon.

Re: "As for the philosophical aspects, I love nothing better than do debate such matters. But I can already see from the other discussions both here and on the other site to know how you would respond, so I don't really see the point."

LOL, that really is a funny kind of cop-out. Why don't you go to that site and debate me, and make me look as silly as you think I am. Go ahead, my friend, embarrass me. Go to that site and take me on if you really "love nothing better than do debate such matters". I'll put my money on your not showing up.

[german_reader]

@Peter Schaeffer

as so often your opinion isn't covered by the facts.

First of all: Since when is Canada a European country? Had we such a dramatic shift in the continental structure of the earth in the last months? Didn't notice.

Second: The reason I've chosen Canada, France or Sweden as possible benchmarks for the US was that they are open societies, with a significant share of foreign born population, which are much better comparable to the US ( even culturally ) than Japan, Taiwan or South-Korea.

I know many Americans believe their country is exceptional, not comparable to other countries. Nonsense. The share of the foreign born population in Canada or Australia for example is more than twice as high as in the US. In France it's slightly lower. The question is why are murder rates in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore so low? Because they practise the death penalty or because they are ethnically ( with the exception of perhaps Singapore ) much more homogeneous than Europe, Canada, Australia or the US? And why, if it's the death penalty, are murder rates in those US states which have capital punishment so much higher? It cannot be the number of executions. Japan ( 127 million inhabitants ) executes around 2 persons per year. And it has a much lower imprisonment rate than the US.

Third: According to our federal police BKA Germany registered in 2006 375 victims of completed murder and 433 victims of completed manslaughter. This results in a homicide rate of 0.98 per 100,000. The number you seem to have in mind ( 2911 victims = 3.53 per 100,000, 2468 cases ) includes attempted homicide and manslaughter. No US state has a murder rate as low as that. The lowest is 1.2 per 100,000 in South Dakota ( according to the Death Penalty Information Center ). And Germany has 82.4 million inhabitants. The share of the foreign born population is nearly the same as in the US. California the largest US state has less than half the population.

The murder rate in Germany has fallen dramatically since 1993 from around 1400 cases ( 1.7 per 100,000 ) to 808 in 2006 ( 0.98 ). I don't know the exact reasons, but we didn't introduce the death penalty. One reason is that the German homicide rate includes government killings from the former German Democratic Republic. They were registered and sentenced after re-unification. This runs out now. And the homicide rate has returned to pre-unification levels.

Fourth: You don't need to look to other countries to notice the advantage of a human crime policy without death penalty. According to the Death Penalty Information Center the average murder rate for the 13 US states without death penalty in 2006 was 3.1 per 100,000, while it was 5.1 per 100,000 in states with death penalty ( seems as if they calculate different than I did in my post above ). Of the twenty US states with the highest murder rate 19 have the death penalty.

Nobody expects the homicide rate in the US to fall as low as in Germany or Norway. But it would be a great success, if the US could reach the average rate of Canada, Australia ( 1.8 per 100,000 ) or the EU as a whole ( 2.37 according to Wikipedia, includes the new EastEuropean members with high murder rates. In WesternEurope it's lower.). This would save 8,000-10,000 Americans every year their lifes. It's like avoiding another Vietnam every 5 or 6 years.

All this is possible without the death penalty as many examples show. The death penalty remains a crime. The arbitrary, unnecessary killing of a human being ( Yes, even murderers are human beings ). There are much better ways to protect the potential victims.

[german_reader]

Correction:

The US state with lowest homicide rate in 2006 was New Hampshire ( 1.0 per 100,000 ). The Death Penalty Information Center presents the homicide rate in descending order from 2006 back to 1996 ( instead of ascending as I thought ). I couldn't read the year numbers in the original page style ( just black fields ). This explains why they come to a different average than I had in my second post above.

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?did=169

The rest of my conclusions remains valid. 5 of 10 US states with the lowest murder rates have no death penalty, 9 of the lowest 20 and only 1 of the 20 states with the highest rates. 12 of 13 US states without death penalty are below the national average ( exception as said above Michigan ).

Wikipedia reports the murder rate for Canada in 2006 at 2.01 and Australia at 1.28. Ten US states had in 2006 a murder rate of 2.0 ( which I consider a realistic target for the US ) or below, half of them without death penalty.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_homicide_rate

[Peter Schaeffer]

German_reader,

Just for you I ran some more regression analyses. The R2 for murder rates versus the death penalty is 0.146. Not very high, but at least the correlation is positive. By contrast, a regression of murder rates versus demographics gives an R2 of 0.691. My data source was exactly the same as yours. I used a value of “1” for any state with the death penalty versus “0” for any state that didn’t have the death penalty.

A quick check of the Census data shows that the 10 states with the lowest murder rates have demographics much like Canada or Germany. You can get the data from http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/tables/07s0023.xls. Once again, the states with the lowest murder rates (and they are quite low) have the same social and economic system as the rest of the United States. Some (notably New Hampshire and Utah) are quite conservative.

You need a new theory to explain the prevalence of murder in the United States.

[Peter Schaeffer]

German_reader,

I don’t believe I have ever claimed Canada was a European country. Please identify the post where I made such a claim.

The average 2006 murder rate for the 10 least deadly US states was 1.58 per 100,000. Well below Canada and Australia and below the EU as a whole assuming your Wikipedia citations are correct.

As I stated earlier, you need a new theory to explain the prevalence of murder in the United States. You can run regressions using the Census data provided above and the homicide rates you already have.

Please don’t refer to the death penalty as a “crime”. Every sovereign nation has the right to impose the death penalty if sees fit to do so. American’s may tolerate such rhetorical excess. I doubt Chinese or the people of Singapore would be so tolerant.

[anne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/20/opinion/l20death.html

Morality and the Death Penalty

To the Editor:

"Does Death Penalty Save Lives? A New Debate":

The revived debate over the death penalty already seems destined to miss the mark. It is not a technical or empirical issue, but a moral one. As such, economists and other social scientists have little to tell us as empirical chroniclers about the death penalty's continued use.

Although a demonstration that the death penalty has no deterrent effect would be morally significant in curbing its use, there is no particular or free-standing moral significance to the claim that it does have some deterrent effect.

There are all manner of punishments and innovations that might be introduced if deterrence were the only or main determinant of its social acceptability: chopping off limbs, stoning people and corporal punishment might be usefully retried.

The fact is that the death penalty, like limb-chopping or stoning, is a morally outrageous practice whatever its deterrent effect: it reduces society to the ethical level of the murderer. In a society that aspires to be moral and just, there is no room for such a state-sanctioned uncivilized practice.

Allan C. Hutchinson
Cambridge, Mass., Nov. 18, 2007
The writer is a visiting professor at Harvard Law School.

[Peter Schaeffer]

MiC,

I mentioned above that the R2 of murder rates versus urbanization was very low (0.03 or less). I ran a set of regressions looking at murder rates versus demographics with and without urbanization as an independent variable.

Regressions using demographics give R2 values around 0.69. However the really notable point is the urbanization was always negatively correlated with murder rates once you added demographics. The negative correlation wasn’t large, but it never went away either. Of course, adding or removing urbanization didn’t change the overall R2 values much.

You need a new theory.

[George Leddy]

What I find very revealing in the debates on the death penalty is the central point that never gets discussed. The government does not execute people because it cannot get up in the morning and tie its shoes. The government creates institutional means to stage the death spectacle. Every execution requires trained personnel who are federal or state employees with health plans, pension plans and normal, job-related problems. The only thing is that their job is not normal.

I don't think we can live in a free society and expect our fellow Americans to become expert in the ways of state-sanctioned murder and not expect profound consequences on the rest of us whose jobs are nothing like theirs.

We are always debating the means of execution (humaneness), the degree of heinousness of the crime (deservedness), the need to provide survivors of the victim with "closure" when an execution is delayed (vengeance), and the need to severely punish the guilty (justice). But who among us should do the job? What do we think of them? How can they get pre-emptive forgiveness and pardon for what they are about to do from the very state that punishes the act of murder by staging another one?

The problem with the death penalty is in its inescapable details. Once examined I am hopeful that most people will realize that there is a limit to the state's claim to a monopoly on violence.

The death penalty is an elaborate and grotesque ritual that requires presumably good people to participate in something so repugnant that it begs the question(s), are all death-row employees psychopaths or ideological fanatics? Do they sleep at night after a job “well done”? What if they like the institution of death and enjoy an execution? What if they don’t? No way out. Either way the elaborate ritual is contradictory.

[run75441]

Peter:

So what on the Michigan stat. With Michigan being at 7.1, the data still does not skew the total non-death penalty results as opposed to states that have the death penalty in support of the contention that the death sentence impedes murder. Michigan ranks 9th amongst all the states after most of the South and Maryland, all of which have the death penalty. Next in line after Michigan is California (death penalty) at 6.8. With the exception of Alaska and Michigan, the other 11 states that do not have a death penalty are in the lower half of in the stats for murder rate.

In death penalty states the murder rate in 1990 was at 9.5/hundred thousand and decreased to 5.87/hundred thousand in 2005 or a reduction of not quite 50%. However, the murder rate in states without the death penalty went from 9.16/hundred thousand to 4.03 in 2005 . . . a reduction of greater than 50%. To state that the death penalty reduces the murder rate is simply false for all intents and purposes. In 2006, the murder rate amongst death penalty states stands at 5.1/hundred thousand; while in non-death penalty states, it stand at 3.1/hundred thousand.

Until such time as states can 100% guarantee that no innocent person is murdered as a result of a trial, the state does not have the right to subvert the sovereign rights of a person who has caused no harm to others. All verdicts are little more than "opinions" and the battle is not so much over justice and truth as much as wins and losses and who gets the notch on their gun or broomstick.

Furthermore, it is cheaper to house a prisoner for natural life than spend the millions on the trial and subsequent appeals before the death sentnce is carried out. We could of course suppression their rights to appeal and flip the rope over the low hanging branch? That would lower the cost. Confinement to 80 to 90 square feet 20 hours a day in a level 4 prison is not something prisoners look forward too the rest of their lives.

[run75441]

Costs of an Execution?

Fact of the matter is that executions cost a bundle and far more than it costs to house a prisoner in the 80 to 90 square feet alotted them for natural life in a level 4 prison, which guarantees 4 hours out and 20 entrapped (don't ask me how I know this).

Lets choose New Jersey as an example:

It has been estimated that the cost of the death penalty is in the $millions due to the appeals and the legal process leading up to that day. This supersedes the cost of confinement. In New Jersey there were ~197 capital cases from 1983 to 2006 of which 60 convictions were obtained and sentenced to death. 50 convictions were reversed and the cost, the cost was an easy $253 million dollars for all. The average cost of incarceration is ~$30,000/year. The economics favors incarceration as well as the punishment of living as a caged animal.

60 convicted at $253 million? Kind of blows that $1 million bill away. Even at $1 million, the cost would last 33 years of imprisonment. So who is BSing who here? If you wanted to raise it to $40,000, it is still 25 years. Most prisoners do not live that long.

I go to a prison 3 to 4 times a month and talk to prisoners, level 2 to level 4. You can believe a statistician or me who has a Masters in Econ/Math and has ACTUALLY set foot in a prison and court for a felony trial. Oh, I forgot . . . if you believe it is about truth and justice maybe you are from a different planet? It is about winners and losers and who gets the notch in their broomstick or gun. That is a different story however . . . any prosecutors out there?

[german_reader]

@run75441,

what I find so fascinating/shocking with regard to the American discussion on the death penalty is that obviously many people are convinced that financial savings could be a sufficient arguments for the killing of a human being. At least here in Europe we treat someone who kills another persons in daily life for pure financial reasons as a murderer. And I think it's not different in the US. I don't see any justification why it should make a difference if it's the public, the state which kills to save money. It remains a killing based on inferior motives.

The same is true for the death penalty as retaliation or revenge. Someone who kills in private life out of revenge or retaliation is treated as murderer or manslaughter. If the state does it to satisfy the needs of the public for revenge or retaliation, it's presented as justice and legitimate behaviour. That's insincere.

The only valid argument which could justify the death penalty is the protection of innocent lifes. But even the most explicit supporters of the death penalty admit that the empirical connection between death penalty and homicide rates is anything but clear. Russia for example has the death penalty and an imprisonment rate slightly below the American rate ( which says a lot about the American imprisonment practice ). The murder rate is 19.8 per hundred thousand. That's extreme. In WesternEurope it's 1.5. Nine European states have a homicide rate of 1.0 or below ( Austria, Denmark, Norway, Iceland, Ireland, Germany, Netherlands, Greece, Luxembourg ). As low or lower than the best US state ( New Hampshire 1.0 ). The average homicide rate of the five largest WestEuropean countries is 1.43 ( UK 2.03, France 1.64, Spain 1.25, Italy 1.23, Germany 0.98 ).

There is no clear causality between the death penalty and homicide rates. And to retain the death penalty because it could "eventually" under very optimistic circumstances save the life of potential victims is not enough. We shouldn't forget, we are talking about the worst of all crimes, the killing of a human being.

The death penalty is a relict from the dark ages. We've dropped most of cruel practices which were once considered as legitimate and unavoidable ( for example torture, mass executions ). We should do the same with the death penalty, everywhere in the world.

P.S

American conservatives seem to believe that the different "demographics" of the US is a sufficient explanation for the higher crime rates in the US ( especially the murder rate ). This might be true to a very limited degree concerning the proportion of young males. But I don't see any reasons why the higher share of black citzens should make any difference. We have many millions of immigrants here in Europe from poorer regions such as Russia, Turkey or Africa with much higher murder rates. In urban areas the percentage of the immigrant population often exceeds 20, 30 or 40%. The effect on the homicide rate should be much larger than it is. Social conditions or weapon laws do matter with regard to homicide and other forms of crime. Skin colour or descent don't.

Conservatives are confusing the symptoms of social exclusion and the lack of life perspectives with the causes of crime.

[calmo]

Such compelling posts run75441, german_reader.
I'm not sure "sufficient" here many people are convinced that financial savings could be a sufficient arguments for the killing of a human being. is anything but short for "sufficient excuse" for those who need to have their barbarism validated "Yo gonna get it!". Suffused in a lot of American pop culture: the Bad Guy (not his circumstances) Loses (his life, the more dramatically, the more vindicating...actually I think this "life" bit is totally ignored, supplanted with "We win", snuffing out any glimmer of social conscience). Saddam not only loses but we watch his head come off as he is handed over from US (institutionalized barbarians) authorities to their less experienced Iraqi partners. The media nodds along...complicitly.

[Peter Schaeffer]

GR,

I have posted sources for US demographics several times. Look them up. Several folks have posted sources for US murder rates by state. Look them up. The US states with European demographics have European (or lower) murder rates.

Don't believe me?

Look up the actual data.

Still don't believe me?

Provide an Email address and I can send you the spreadsheet with the regressions.

Still don't believe me?

Check out http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/race.htm for the Department of Justice homicide statistics.

[Peter Schaeffer]

All,

I have an observation for those who question the morality and righteousness of the death penalty. A few years ago, a criminal (racketeering and fraud convictions) governor of Illinois (he got 6 1/2 years) decided that he could try to redeem his standing in the community by commuting all pending death sentences. His ploy was dismally transparent, but all of the usual suspects praised him in spite of his obvious criminal conduct.

As part of the commutation process, hearings were held for each inmate who had been on death row. The opponents of the death penalty hoped that these forums would show what sort of injustice had been done to the death row inmates. It didn’t work out that way…

Once the public started to hear about the violence, the savagery, and the utter disdain for human life these killers had shown, support for the death penalty started to rise rather quickly. In short order, the opponents of the death penalty were demanding that the hearings be stopped.

So that’s what opposition to the death penalty amounts to. A system where the heinous crimes of the killers have to be covered up, so that public support for something less than execution can be maintained.

[anne]

"The US states with European demographics have European (or lower) murder rates."

Thus, the pseudo-science of crazed prejudice.

[Peter Schaeffer]

George Leddy,

There is no shortage of folks quite willing to carry out the death penalty. And they are not ashamed of it either. Nor do they have any reason to be.

From "Clemency hearings a study in anguish" (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-021028anguish,1,4734870.story?page=2)

'Sam Evans, father of Addison woman Debra Evans, talked with quiet, slow hatred about Fedell Caffey... (the rest of the story isn't appropriate for a family oriented blog)

"If you are having trouble finding someone to pull the switch, to make the injection, to shoot him, I volunteer," he said. "I'll kill him myself if it's a problem for this state, this governor."'

[anne]

Always the monster being a monster; always incapable of less than monstrousness.

[run75441]

Peter Schaeffer:

Sure, Ryan did it to redeem himself. You fail to mention that the evidence was lacking to execute (or murder if carried through) the prisoners commuted to a life sentence or exonerated to freedom (167 total). You also fail to mention the new evidence suggested otherwise. Such puffery Peter . . . why not volunteer and be the one to pull the switch? Almost like emptying a clip of M-16 rounds into the head of a VC as he emerges from a spider hole. I can vouch for that one. Except the VC are armed and a prisoner is strapped in to enjoy the ride. Such bravado! If you want the stats and the numbers for what I have provided as a rebuke to you . . . google Amnesty International. Your numbers in support of executions and murder rates are weak at best.

General Economist Readers:

If there is anyone here who can envison a "natural life" spent behind bars 20 hours a day with 4 hours out for recreation, please reveal yourself? This is actuality for someone convicted in Michigan and I see them several times a month. It is a life of cheering a "squirrel onward" that makes the leap from the grounds behind the razor-barbed wire to the first fence and over the wire to the next fence and over the wire. The prisoners cheer the squirrel on and they never leave and are forever interred. A squirrel can come and go and a prisoner can not. If you want to punish, imprison them for natural life. It is a living hell.

German_Reader:

I can not disagree with you. Been a while since I have been to Homburg and Stuttgart. I liked Germany and I find the people very similar to US citizens. However my friend, there is no way that Europe is like the George Bush society existing today. We are still very much the cowboys of the 19th century.

"if it's the public, the state which kills to save money. It remains a killing based on inferior motives."

I argue the numbers because what is purported by the "Peters" of the world is just plain false. There is no sound reason to excute unless you are like Ron White:

“You come to Texas and kill somebody...we'll kill you back.”

The system of execution is based upon this verse from the old testament.

“If any harm follows, then you shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound and stripe for stripe.” Exodus 21:23-21:25

It is the basis for the the law of retribution allowing the injured, or society, to extract a measure of punishment upon the perpetrator to make the victim, or society, supposedly whole again. It does not have merit if we are what one would call a society of culture.

There is no deterrent asscoiated with the death penalty with regard to homicide. Those states such as Louisiana have a homicide rate of over 11/100,000 citizens (#10) and yet they have a death penalty. In terms of urban areas, Maryland surpasses Michigan in homicides and yet it has a death penalty. Other than Alaska, the other 11 states which do not have death penalties are in the lower half as far as homicides. So why have a death penalty other than to satisfy our Judge Roy Bean and "Hang Them High" mentality? It does not deter homicides and is more expensive than executions unless you subvert the rights of prisoners for appeal, which in most cases is the state's fault for not having a fast hearing. In Michigan, the state gets an automatic 6 month stay (beyond the 45 days) to answer an appeal. When they do file, they are not held to the same rules as a prisoner who files having to meet deadlines. In other words a state is not held to the same standard in federal court as a prisoner in meeting deadline dates.

As far as blacks, minorities, and the poor . . . maybe if the separate but equal doctrine were true; those who argue the death penalty might have an argument. It is not (please anyone argue the economics of this) though. Someone here, or maybe on The Fray, argued that most homicides are not thought out. and they are actions of the moment. Inclusive in this is everyone regardless of race or economic status.

Hatred of the murderer is not the answer either.

[run75441]

calmo:

and most people here and in this country have yet to pull the trigger on a human being. Be the one and volunteer to execute a human or better yet, enlist and go to Iraq or Afghanistan to be shot at and return fire. Do either and then come talk to me.

The attitude today is little better than the coliseum of Rome. Vote them up or down as Bush would say. Life or death. But if you do so, YOU DAMN WELL BETTER WATCH the death of another human being. It is a learning experience and one we should All have at least once in our lives.

The data German Reader and I have provided is enough for those without the lust for blood.

[Peter Schaeffer]

Run75441,

Most of the Illinois death row inmates were unequivocally guilty. Many freely admitted their guilt. The idea that evidence was lacking in most of these cases is far-fetched at best.

From “Relatives of victims feel 'cheated'” (http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-030112clem3,0,2826081.story)

“Notorious cases

While Ryan's mass clemency spared the lives of inmates who maintain their innocence, it applied equally to those who acknowledged their guilt. And it meant the state's most notorious convicted killers will never be executed.

Fedell Caffey and his former girlfriend, Jacqueline Williams, were on Death Row for killing Addison resident Debra Evans, her two children and cutting a full-term fetus from Evans' womb. Evans' brother, Sam Evans Jr., said Ryan's decision means his family will never gain any peace.

"He's seen to it that us and all of the families waiting will never have that final closure," he said. "We've been robbed of our justice. He cannot state that there was any error whatsoever in our specific case. It was just wrong. There's no other way of putting it."

Gregory Jackson, father of an 11-year-old boy who was slain with his mother as they slept in 1987, said he understood the need for clemency in certain cases, but that blanket sentence commutations were hard to take.”

By the way, I haven’t presented any numbers attempting to demonstrate the deterrent value of the death penalty. The data is complex enough to require extensive analysis which is the point of the many papers cited in the New York Times article.

I have attacked the very simplistic critiques of the death penalty that have been posted here. For example, I have demonstrated that “urbanization” does not explain the incidence of murder in the United States. I have also shown that the parts of the US with demographics comparable, to Europe have European or lower murder rates (in spite of our allegedly inferior social and economic system).

[german_reader]

@Peter Schaeffer

you repeat again and again the same mistake. You're obviously convinced that being black, having a higher proportion of black citizens is a sufficient explanation for higher murder/crime rates.

I find it revealing that most of the states in the American South are among the twenty states with the highest murder rates. It's only a few decades ago that they've more or less voluntarily finished race segregation. There have been a lot of improvements since then. But fact is: Being black in America means on average being poor, less educated, having a higher risk of unemployment and less social perspectives. And everywhere in the world where major parts of the population are excluded, ( relatively, inequality matters ) poor and without positive perspectives, crime rates are higher.

In my opinion conservatives all over the world ( not only in the US ) tend to concentrate on the symptoms of social problems and ignore the reasons behind. And they rely on punishment and pressure to change the bevaviour of individuals, while progressives believe in cooperation, education and positive incentives. That's a fundamental difference in the image of humanity and the view of the world.

Besides social problems are only one possible cause for higher murder rates. Loose weapon laws and the wide spread of weapons can be another. Switzerland ( 2.94 ), Finland ( 2.77 ) or Sweden ( 2.39 ), countries with good or very good social conditions, have astonishingly high murder rates by European standards. Switzerland is the country where every adult man ( that's the cliché ) has a gun in his wardrobe and Sweden or Finland are sparsely populated countries with a lot of hunters. Weapons there are probably easier available than in Central Europe.

@run75441

Your reference to the old testament ( "eye for eye, tooth for tooth" ) is interesting. I had the same idea. I think after a long and violent odyssey through the world history and the horrors of WW I and WW II we've finally learned here in Europe ( hopefully ) that a political, social system based entirely on retaliation and revenge ( the old testament ) doesn't work. We have changed instead to a political approach which is more based on the new testament and emphasizes cooperation, compromise and conciliation ( only 2000 years after Jesus of Nazareth, isn't that progressive? ). The results are convincing.

This could be a lesson for the US. If you want to run a very large and very diverse political and social entity, it's better to concentrate more on social and economic equation and the peaceful resolution of conflicts. In concrete this would mean to have higher investments into the social and educational system and redistibute more than the smaller and more homogeneous European countries or Japan, not less as today. ( And on the international level: Diplomacy is often more successful than military power. )

[german_reader]

Am I the only one, who has problems to read the new authentifcation code require for commenting?

[run75441]

All:

Lets' get one thing straight, it is not the victims or the relation's justice. It is society on trial and the trier of fact in this case of all those who have allegedly committed a crime. There is no cheating the victim or the victim's relations.

Furthermore, if one thinks that trials are about justice, guess again. Court trials are about winners and losers. If the truth happens to come out, everyone lucks out. Most of the time it doesn't come out in entirety. The court system is adversarial and people get paid for winning trials and not discovering the truth and administering justice.

Peter . . . what percentage of cases never go to trial? Would you believe ~85%? And why is that Peter? Because most people can not afford thousands of dollars to defend themselves in the court system. Most cases are plea bargained in which case they ADMIT guilt. Of all cases, a small percentage actually do go to trial and of those tried, upwards of 9 percent are innocent. Unless of course, you believe Marquis and Scalia?

That Fedell Caffey sentence was commuted to life behind bars cheats no one. That he is forced to live out his life in a space of ~80 square feet is punishment, when one is used to roaming at will. I see that as a far worst sentence, having to live out one's life confined to 80 square feet 20 hours a day the rest of your life. Yours or their point does not have merit as Fedell's sentence is a living death. Pickup Gilligan's (MD) book; "Violence" as it looks into the minds of murderers and why they do it. I am satisfied justice has been accomplished without our taking on the mantle of murdering the same as Fedell.

I apologize for being abusive towards you. Been through a felony trial and it was all I could do to remain silent during the legal gymnastics. They really think we are stupid.

German_Reader:

Perhaps Tom Hertz's "Understanding Upward Mobility in America." www.americanprogress.org/kf/hertz_mobility_analysis.pdf will give you a snapshot of life in America. Ultimately, the chances of someone from the lowest quintile of income rising into the next quintile is abysmal at best. The probability of them remaining there in the lowest quintile is greater than their rising upwards. A father's income and the ability to get an education are the keys to achieving upward mobility in the US. That education and resources are inferior in many parts of the US almost guarantees the inability of the poor to increase in income. Your points on economic inequality are sound ones and it has worsened in the US since 2001 with poverty increasing, job creation down, and employment Participation Rate the lowest it has been since the eighties. The Gini Ratio is .47. I think we have superceded England in income inequity.

The US legal system is based on retaliation and follows the "eye for an eye" philosophy. It is a combative system and people pick their champions to do battle in front of a man dressed in black and a jury of people who do not know what jury nullification is or the difference between guilty but mentally ill and guilty (there is none).

The US population is changing as our birth rate is ~2.1 or replacement rate. Immigrants are largely Hispanic and our makeup by 2050 will be split between Hispanics and the rest of us. In one way it is a good thing as we do not face the same issues as Russia. In another way, it is not so good as we have not laid the ground work for education and jobs. We need to change our outlook. "300 Million and Counting" Smithsonian (Joel Garreau) is a nice snapshot of the changes taking place and what the US has to look forward too in the future. www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/presence-oct06.html It is not a bad outlook to have if we adjust.

And yes Geman_Reader, there are issues with the codes.

[Peter Schaeffer]

Run75441,

You comparison of death penalty (DP) states and non-DP states strikes me as somewhat thoughtless. Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to confuse correlation with causation?

It turns out that there is a rather strong correlation between the number of firemen who fight a fire and the amount of fire damage done. Are you now convinced that firemen cause fire damage? Should we ban firemen to minimize fire damage.

To state this directly, I can’t image a student passing a first year statistics course with your level of analysis. Perhaps my standards are too high…

Your statements about changes in murder rates from 1990 to 2005 are not correct. The 1990 murder rate in DP states was 7.76 per 100,000, not 9.5. My source is http://bjsdata.ojp.usdoj.gov/dataonline/Search/Crime/State/StateCrime.cfm.

A linear regression of state murder rates changes (the ratio of 1990 or 1996 to 2006) versus the DP shows a positive correlation between the DP and greater reductions in homicide. However, the R Squared, Significance-F and P-value show that the linkage is not statistically significant.

Your statement that

“Until such time as states can 100% guarantee that no innocent person is murdered as a result of a trial, the state does not have the right to subvert the sovereign rights of a person who has caused no harm to others.”

Ignores at least three serious points. First, many capital cases are far from ambiguous. In many cases, the defendant is quite willing to admit his or her crime in open court. In other cases, DNA data or video tapes make it quite clear who committed the crime. Second, the failure to impose the DP condemns innocent life. You may not appreciate this point, but innocent life has value as well. Third, the actual execution of criminals is a vast benefit to those left behind when a capital crime occurs. Assuredly the well being of the families of victims must take precedence over the murderously vile.

Your argument that it is cheaper to impose life in prison versus execution both misses the point and makes it. First, you have succumbed to treating execution as an economic procedure subject to cost-benefit analysis. Several posters have gone to pains to condemn the morality of this approach. However, you have also failed to place any value on the innocent life saved by executing criminals. Was this an oversight or does innocent life have no value for you?

As for your New Jersey statistics, please post a source. However, if New Jersey had successfully executed say 50 killers, the resulting preservation of innocent life would have been worth far more than $253 million, using standard values for the value of a life and the number of lives saved per execution.

[Peter Schaeffer]

George Leddy,

An American by the name of Paul Tibbets died recently. He was the pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. He was also the commander and organizer of the 509 bomber group (which handled Nagasaki as well).

He was frequently asked if he had any regrets about the atomic bombings. He always said that he never lost a moment’s sleep over the role he had played. He was proud of what he did and rightly so.

Most, if not almost all, of the Japanese killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were civilians including vast numbers of innocent women and children. By contrast, the criminals executed in the United States are very worst of the very bad.

The idea that US executioners would have a problem with their job strikes me as rather strange. Why would they have any remorse, given the vast and horrible crimes of the criminals they remove from society?

[Peter Schaeffer]

GR,

The argument for the death penalty is not the potential financial savings from execution, but the value of innocent life. Some people value innocent life, other’s don’t. Each of us chooses.

However, you don’t seem to have a problem with the opponents of the death penalty complaining about how expensive it is. So it’s OK to use financial savings to oppose the death penalty, but not to argue in its favor?

The savings of innocent life from the imposition of the death penalty aren’t “eventual”. The time frames are statically predictable.

You state

“American conservatives seem to believe that the different "demographics" of the US is a sufficient explanation for the higher crime rates in the US”

This isn’t a “belief”, it is a straight forwards fact. Check out the data over at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/race.htm. Murder rates by race are stated and yes they differ by most of an order of magnitude. If you don’t have access to the Internet, I can Email you the data.

Please do not compare immigrants in Europe with high crime groups in the US. First, the highest crime groups in the US are not immigrants. Second, immigrants are far from homogenous. Every European nation has Arab/Muslim immigrants and immigrants from Asia. In every European country that publishes statistics, Arab/Muslim immigrants are vastly overrepresented in the criminal population and Asians are underrepresented. Predictably, similar patterns exist in the US (although US Arabs/Muslims are not a high crime group).

For a set of US data, check out “Debunking the Myth of Immigrant Criminality: Imprisonment Among First- and Second-Generation Young Men” (http://www.migrationinformation.org/Feature/display.cfm?id=403). The title is ironic because the actual data shows very high crime rates among some second generation immigrant groups. However, the relevant point here is the vast disparity in incarceration rates among first generation immigrants. First generation Puerto Ricans are 41.4 times more likely to be incarcerates than Indians.

[Peter Schaeffer]

Run75441,

I find it hard to believe that you are using state level comparisons to argue against the death penalty. Should I send you a few links on “correlation versus causation”?

Your comment about “In Michigan, the state gets an automatic 6 month stay (beyond the 45 days) to answer an appeal” is strange. Michigan does not have the death penalty.

I have already posted the racial stats for the death penalty. However, just in case you didn’t see them, whites account for 57% of all executions but only 45.3% of death row inmates.

[Peter Schaeffer]

GR,

“you repeat again and again the same mistake. You're obviously convinced that being black, having a higher proportion of black citizens is a sufficient explanation for higher murder/crime rates.”

Before you accuse me of a “mistake” check out the actual data over at http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/homicide/race.htm Perhaps the Department of Justice has a counting problem. Perhaps not.

Your comment about the South having a high murder rate reminds me of MiC. He tried to argue that “urbanization” explained differences in the homicide rate. That got him an R Square of around 0.03 raw and an inverted relationship (more urbanization equals less murder) once you add demographics.

It turns out that 16 states are classified as “Southern” by the US census. A simple regression of “Southern” versus homicide rates gives an R Square of 0.304. Not too bad and the Significance F and P-value are quite good.

However, adding demographics shows that “Southern” is simply a weak proxy for demographics. With demographics included the R Square jumps to 0.688. The P-values for the demographic values are superb. The P-value for “Southern” shows that with demographics included, “Southern” loses all statistical significance. As with MiC, you need to find a new theory.

Your argument about poverty doesn’t hold either. Many of the states with the lowest homicide rates aren’t rich by any means. For example, Hawaii, Maine, Montana, North Dakota, and South Dakota aren’t affluent. However, they bring up the rear in murder.

Of course, simple state level comparisons don’t mean much. Once again linear regression bears considerable light on this subject. By itself, “percent in poverty” (2003 – 2004) versus homicide gives an R Square of 0.271. Not very good, but the Significance F and P-value are excellent.

Once again, adding demographics changes everything. The overall R Square jumps to 0.711. However, with demographics added, the P-value for “percent in poverty” shows that poverty is only marginally related to homicide. Notably the Adjusted R Square for demographics alone is 0.6734. Adding “percent in poverty” only raises it to 0.6920. In other words, “percent in poverty” add very little to an understanding of the variation in homicide rates. Once again, you need a new theory.

[Peter Schaeffer]

Run75441,

“Lets' get one thing straight, it is not the victims or the relation's justice”

I think the families of capital murder victims would be inclined to disagree.

Your reference to inequality in America is almost funny. Since 1990 inequality has risen (a lot) and murder has fallen (a lot). The correlation between inequality and murder is almost certainly negative (more inequality is associated with less murder). Do I really ascribe a casual relationship here? No. However, once again correlation and causation are not the same thing.

By now this should be obvious and predictable… However, a regression of state level Gini’s versus homicide turns up a weak linkage. Once again, adding demographics eliminates it.

[ian]

Peter Schaeffer said 'India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are all democracies.'

No, Singapore is not a democracy

Also, on topic now; it is said victims need 'closure'. Have any studies been done comparing how victims and or their relatives feel after either an execution or, say, a life sentence
Are people socially or culturally conditioned to expect to feel 'closure' after an execution.
Life imprisonment seems a more 'satisfying' form of revenge to me

[piglet]

Peter, you old statistics murderer.

"You comparison of death penalty (DP) states and non-DP states strikes me as somewhat thoughtless. Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to confuse correlation with causation?

It turns out that there is a rather strong correlation between the number of firemen who fight a fire and the amount of fire damage done. Are you now convinced that firemen cause fire damage? Should we ban firemen to minimize fire damage."

For the record, the proper comparison would be to compare fire damage in states where there is no fire brigade at all (which I asume don,t exist), with those states that have fire brigades. The Null hypothesis would be "fire brigades are not effective in reducing fire damage". The Null hypothesis would be rejected if states without a fire brigade record significantly (at the chosen significance level) higher fire damage than the others. Otherwise, it would not be rejected.

In the case of capital punishment, you clearly have not refuted the Null hypothesis ("the death penalty is not effective in reducing crime"). It is not worth to discuss your fanatical rants any more. You are a sad case of ideological blindness.