If you're anywhere near a criminologist's head at the moment, it's advised that you take cover.
"Science does really draw a conclusion. It did. There is no question about it," said Naci Mocan, an economics professor at the University of Colorado at Denver. "The conclusion is there is a deterrent effect."A 2003 study he co-authored, and a 2006 study that re-examined the data, found that each execution results in five fewer homicides, and commuting a death sentence means five more homicides. "The results are robust, they don't really go away," he said. "I oppose the death penalty. But my results show that the death penalty (deters) — what am I going to do, hide them?"
Statistical studies like his are among a dozen papers since 2001 that capital punishment has deterrent effects. They all explore the same basic theory — if the cost of something (be it the purchase of an apple or the act of killing someone) becomes too high, people will change their behavior (forego apples or shy away from murder).
To explore the question, they look at executions and homicides, by year and by state or county, trying to tease out the impact of the death penalty on homicides by accounting for other factors, such as unemployment data and per capita income, the probabilities of arrest and conviction, and more.
Among the conclusions:
# Each execution deters an average of 18 murders, according to a 2003 nationwide study by professors at Emory University. (Other studies have estimated the deterred murders per execution at three, five and 14).
# The Illinois moratorium on executions in 2000 led to 150 additional homicides over four years following, according to a 2006 study by professors at the University of Houston.
# Speeding up executions would strengthen the deterrent effect. For every 2.75 years cut from time spent on death row, one murder would be prevented, according to a 2004 study by an Emory University professor.
Hats off to Professor Mocan for having the integrity to publish his results even though he opposes the death penalty. He provides a wonderful example of what real scholarship is.
so how many criminals do we have to off to get the murder rate to zero?
can we put the Khadr family in this group?
True, Jim. It would seem that integrity lives after all ....
It has always been easy to disprove the "no, capital punishment doesn't deter" argument, but it's still nice to see actual data supporting the "yes it does" side.
Still, the whole debate is irrelevant.
The subject is capital PUNISHMENT, not capital deterrence. And the purpose of any form of punishment is to punish. Period, full stop. Deterrence, if it occurs (which it does), is strictly a beneficial side-effect.
Keep that in mind, and all anti-CP arguments are rendered moot.
Make the penalty of running a red light or not stopping at a school bus stopped or at a crosswalk a dollar and who would stop? Make driving while drunk a dollar fine and who would hire a taxi? Naturally deterance work and the death penalty is the ultimate.
Truly excellent work.
If nothing else it is a proven fact that an executed killer will not do any more crimes, of any kind.
In respect to the philosphers of rational deduction in the previous post. I have to wonder how they can possibly make direct equational deterrence stats?
This is so subjective...how can you possibly tell if a murder was deterred by an execution? Who were the sample group what is their tendency quotient to murder...where is the control group..what is their predelection to murder...what is the "normal" deterrence factor?.
Has this study withstood Popper's peer group critical rationalization?
I certainly would like to believe this is true...and my common sense says execution should be a deterrent in most cases...but how one can build reliable statististics on such a subjective issue evades me.
How many murderers are deterred when an innocent person is executed?
'How many murderers are deterred when an innocent person is executed?'
An innocent person is executed during every murder. With DNA testing it's not likely an innocent will go to the gallows.
I would be in favour of CP if I knew where the person went after they died. We could be rewarding them rather than punishing them.
Re Ducks says
****...but how one can build reliable statististics on such a subjective issue evades me.*****
Re Ducks, may I suggest U take a coures on statistics!!!!!!
I'll bet there would be a deterrent effect if prison were made a not-so-nice place to be in, rather than an exclusive country club.
Illinois brought in its moritorium because re-opened cases showed so many innocent people were on its death row. There is no magic technology to prove guilt or innocence, nor is justice, especially in the US, particularly efficient. Just ask OJ, between golf games. Semi-retarded poor person, court-appointed lawyer = death. Rich with good lawyers = acquittal or deal.
This is one of those topics that I can do a fairly good job of arguing either side of, for various reasons, but instead perhaps let me refer to a more interesting essay on the matter than I would be likely to produce under the circumstances:
n Guilty Men
Alexander Volokh
146 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 173 (1997)
My only reservations regarding capital punishment are related to the present state of our justice system.
If I thought I could trust them to do a good job within the limits of human fallibility I'd be all for it. Nothing is perfect, but if people make an effort and work with professionalism and good intent, we can come pretty close.
This does not describe Canadian Justice at this time. So I don't think we want to go there just now, except in the most egregious cases when the evidence is diamond hard.
Besides, we have an alternative to state sponsored capital punishment. The deterrence factor is far higher, there are no lawyers involved, and best of all it doesn't cost tax dollars.
This alternative is called the armed citizen. Best way to be sure of getting the right guy is when the intended victim shoots the would-be murderer.
Pass the Castle Doctrine. Make self defense legal again and watch the murder rate plummet.
The power of life and death is permitted to certain civil magistrates because theirs is the responsibility under law to punish the guilty and protect the innocent. Far from being guilty of breaking this commandment [Thy shall not kill], such an execution of justice is precisely an act of obedience to it. For the purpose of the law is to protect and foster human life. This purpose is fulfilled when the legitimate authority of the State is exercised by taking the guilty lives of those who have taken innocent lives.
In the Psalms we find a vindication of this right: “Morning by morning I will destroy all the wicked in the land, cutting off all evildoers from the city of the Lord” (Ps. 101:8).
(Roman Catechism of the Council of Trent, 1566, Part III, 5, n. 4)
I'm sorry, I'm such a ditz - here's the link:
n Guilty Men
Alexander Volokh
146 University of Pennsylvania Law Review 173 (1997)
www.law.ucla.edu/volokh/guilty.htm
If 100 people are executed and 5 were actually innocent,that would be a shame. If 100 murderers did thier time and were released they would probably end up killing again. I don't know the exact recividism rate but I think it is about %25. Therefore executing 100 murderers saves 20 innocents. Works for me.
Don't travel in Texas, Wally. Karma's a bitch.
One thing is for sure TED BUNDY,ROBERT ALTON HARRIS and TOOKIE WILLIAMS will never murder anyone again now all they have to do is elminate all those stupid appeals,stays of exicutions and tell those liberal bleedinghearts to light their candles and remember the victims and not the murderers
I have no doubt that bringing back CP would reduce murders in Canada to just about zero ... however, manslaughters would go up dramatically.
"The two boys had initially been charged with second-degree murder in connection with Thandi's death, but it was reduced to manslaughter after the judge said they didn't have the experience or foresight to show murderous intent."
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/british-columbia/story/2007/06/13/bc-apology.html
Gang-bangers, child molesters, murderers: Smoke 'em if you got 'em.
Nice duplicity on display here. On the basis of one study the commenter's goto town. Yet at the same time if one study is shown to support Global Warming (one of thousands, of course) then you get post titles such as the one a few post previously ("the sound of settled science").
You can't have it both ways, so make a choice.
As to this post in particular, kill em' all and let God sort em' out! A great idea until it is you or someone you know who gets caught in that net....
Sean S.: Nice duplicity on display here. On the basis of one study the commenter's goto town."
Did you read the article? They quoted five different studies.
Apparently, your reading comprehension needs work, as does your spelling.
if there is any doubt then no cp. if there are reliable witnesses then yes.
one thing i know to be 100% true....the man who murdered my uncle did 9 years for his first murder...if he would have been executed, my uncle would be alive today.....so, tell me moonbats, why is it ok for murderer's to be put back on the street???please answer me dipper retards, my family would like to know....why was that scumbag allowed to live??why is my uncle dead????that piece of shit will murder for a third time, no doubt in my mind....please,alby, liberia, and all you other leftard idiots, please answer that question....did my unlce not have a right to live?
CP does not belong in a civilized society. Lock them in for life when needed, anything more is the barbarian solution.
civilized society eh? how about the victims of repeat murderer's....how civilized is that? why is clifford olsen allowed to live? so he can taunt his victim's families? oh ya, that is really civilized...how about the fact that homolka received a law degree as a reward for murdering her own sister...very civilized....the picton crew out west..let's give them a another chance...oh ya baby, that would be civilized
can hardly wait until this comes up with my little Green friends. I have the perfect response to their outrage and disbelief: "Respect the facts".
Civilized society??? As kingstonlad said,oh yah baby. And let's give Leon Tetsky another chance to get out and murder somebody,or beat another senior citizen into a coma. Works for me. Maybe the problem is we are killing the wrong people? Those who would "civilize" us seem to be posing more of a threat than the average Joe Blow defending his life and his families. Opppppssss...went and said that nasty defending word.
Although these results demonstrate the existence of the deterrent effect of capital punishment, it should be noted that there remain a number of significant issues surrounding the imposition of the death penalty. For example, although the Supreme Court of the United States remains unconvinced that there exists racial discrimination in the imposition of the death penalty, recent research points to the possibility of such discrimination. Along the same lines, there is evidence indicating that there is discrimination regarding who gets executed and whose sentence gets commuted once the death penalty is received. Given these concerns, a stand for or against capital punishment should be taken with caution.
The same people who bash the courts and judges all the time and believe government is corrupt seem to lose their principles when it comes to capital punishment. All of a sudden judges seem to merit the power of life and death.
Be consistent, folks.
GYM> "Re Ducks, may I suggest U take a coures on statistics!!!!!!"
Stat process control six sigma, Juran Inst. grad 82...frick mindless partisanism gets thick here.
Another dip in the SD bell curve with ad hominem attacks and no supporting factual argument.
GYM> "Re Ducks, may I suggest U take a coures on statistics!!!!!!"
Stat process control six sigma, Juran Inst. grad 82...frick mindless partisanism gets thick here.
Another dip in the SD bell curve with Ad Homenim attacks and no supporting factual argument.
Eddie Goldenberg, can you provide us with the name of even one person who was innocent and was executed (in either Canada or the USA)?
I don't think you can, because if there was such a person, we would know his name.
There have been some excellent arguments here on either side of the CP issue but I notice they revolve around the constant of accepting CP as a "deterrent".
If I was to make one concerted plea to the feds to reinstate CP it would not use the "deterrent" argument as this is too hard to prove empirically one way or the other.
I think the value of a precise and just application of CP is 2 fold:
1) It is an absolute guarantee of zero recidivism from the murderer...CP guarantees a sociopath with not be free to murder again...not even fellow inmates who are also under state protection.
2) It represents closure and a small restitutive comfort to the victim's family who have been traumatized by this criminal (who are also victimized collaterally)...
... and it signifies closure in the justice system...where a true and ultimate justice is meted out, not pusillanimous legal maneuvering to spare the life of sociopathic murdering miscreants incapable of social/civil empathy. It clearly sends the message that the justice system is not about rehabilitation but extracting justice for crimes.
Personally I feel that if the state extracts the life of a criminal for an innocent life he has taken, this signifies the state values the lives of its citizens....conversely if the state superficially punishes murderers then this makes the statement that the sate holds the lives of its citizens to be cheap and expendable.
Restoring CP restores faith in the justice system as being a champion of the victims of crime...not the criminal. Focusing justice values towards the criminal has brought the Canadian justice system into wide public disrepute.
I would be more willing to support the death penalty in practice if there was a higher burden of proof (circumstantial evidence wouldn't be near enough.)
As it stands, the potential for police with tunnel vision and the possibility of error is too high.
It isn't a moral complaint, if there is enough solid, indesputable proof I'm all for it. Murderers should not only be put down like dogs, they should suffer at it.
CP is irreversible. Once terminated, a life cannot be reinstated. That's one good 16 ton argument against it.
Exactly, Aaron. I'm all for the death penalty in theory, for many of the reasons given by various commentors, but against it in practice as the justice system is flawed and humans all too fallible to error (shoddy investigations, political pressures or biases affecting the conduct of the case, lousy legal representation for the defendent, etc).
If an execution could be reversed once carried out, then fine; until then, better to press the politicians until "life imprisonment" means exactly that.
From the same article:
The reports have horrified death penalty opponents and several scientists, who vigorously question the data and its implications. So far, the studies have had little impact on public policy. New Jersey's commission on the death penalty this year dismissed the body of knowledge on deterrence as "inconclusive."
Some claim that the pro-deterrent studies made profound mistakes in their methodology, so their results are untrustworthy. Another critic argues that the studies wrongly count all homicides, rather than just those homicides where a conviction could bring the death penalty. And several argue that there are simply too few executions each year in the United States to make a judgment.
"We just don't have enough data to say anything," said Justin Wolfers, an economist at the Wharton School of Business who last year co-authored a sweeping critique of several studies, and said they were "flimsy" and appeared in "second-tier journals."
"This isn't left vs. right. This is a nerdy statistician saying it's too hard to tell," Wolfers said. "Within the advocacy community and legal scholars who are not as statistically adept, they will tell you it's still an open question. Among the small number of economists at leading universities whose bread and butter is statistical analysis, the argument is finished."
Then, economist Isaac Ehrlich had also concluded that executions deterred future crimes. His 1975 report was the subject of mainstream news articles and public debate, and was cited in papers before the U.S. Supreme Court arguing for a reversal of the top U.S. court's 1972 suspension of executions. (The court, in 1976, reinstated the death penalty.) Ultimately, a panel was set up by the National Academy of Sciences which decided that Ehrlich's conclusions were flawed. But the new pro-deterrent studies have not gotten that kind of scrutiny.
One study, which is actually only a rehash of the author's earlier study, points in a different direction than almost every single other study and concludes with confident definity where the best anyone else has concluded is that it's statistically too hard to say one way or another.
With such a charged political/moral issue, with only selective MSM reporting on the underlying report itself, with almost all other reports on the issue going the other way, with no clarity on the methodology of this guy's report... I'm not going to hang too much importance on it.
What is kinda interesting is that one day the justice system is rotten to the core with "liberal activist judges" making law and can't be trusted in a justice system that is rotten to the core fronted by a police on the frontlines who haven't nearly enough money all reported on by a news media that itself is completely incompetent and biased that skewers science from universities it isn't capable of understanding which universities are rotten to the core and full of lazy ivory tower academics living off the public teat... and the next day some jump on a single report by a single academic as reported in the same MSM about how we should empower the same justice system to kill. Un hunh. Right.
Patina:
Here's two, right off the top of my head: Coffin, who was railroaded to the gallows for allegedly killing American tourists in the Gaspe; and Whelan, the guy hanged on flimsy evidence for killing Darcy McGee. There was also a convincing story in Ottawa City magazine four years ago about a guy hanged in Ottawa in the Depression for killing a gast station attedent. Before teh victim died, he looked at a picture of the suspect and said he wasn't the guy. The judge said the jury shouldn't have convicted on the evidence. The guy was hanged anyway. Then there's the Truscott case. I believe he did it, but I suspect the review will say there wasn't a fair trial in the case.
New Claims about Executions and General Deterrence: Déjà Vu All Over Again? by Richard Berk, Department of Statistics, UCLA
Journal of Empirical Legal Studies
Volume 2 Issue 2 Page 303Issue 2 - 330 - July 2005
Abstract: A number of papers have recently appeared claiming to show that in the United States executions deter serious crime. There are many statistical problems with the data analyses reported. This article addresses the problem of "influence," which occurs when a very small and atypical fraction of the data dominate the statistical results. The number of executions by state and year is the key explanatory variable, and most states in most years execute no one. A very few states in particular years execute more than five individuals. Such values represent about 1 percent of the available observations. Reanalyses of the existing data are presented showing that claims of deterrence are a statistical artifact of this anomalous 1 percent.
"In January [2000], Republican Governor George Ryan of Illinois suspended all execcutions in that state after 13 death row inmates were found to have been wrongly convicted."*
"CP is irreversible. Once terminated, a life cannot be reinstated. That's one good 16 ton argument against it."
Given, Faint Hope, parole, stays, appeals, and activist unelected judges making up law to suit their fancy, 16 1/2 tons for it.
WTF Eddie?! Capital punishment at the hand of the intended victim, AKA self defense. Haven't you been listening?
I wanna hear you and Johan argue against that one.
Bottom line, we want our rights to the armed defense of life, liberty and property back, we want our courts and our cops to be both trustworthy and effective for those rare cases where the perp survives, and we want the punishment to fit the crime.
Right now we've got none of the above, and frankly it p1sses me off to hear guys like you blather on about civilized behavior while kids are getting shot dead in the street.
So Eddie. When Mr. "I was abused" shoves the knife down your throat or rapes and shoots your daughter, YOU are going to standby and say YOU DO NOT have the right to defend yourself...AKA the death penalty? If you say yes,I say good. One more for the Darwinsim award. I just feel sorry for your daughter.
Phantom...these clowns will never believe in it...until it hits home..and then it's too damn late!!!
You too, Ted. Executions deter repeat offences. Life in prison gives those so inclined a captive victim pool to kill again. And they do. Guys die in prison all the time.
The science on this subject is probably less partisan than it is on gun control or global warming.
True, Justthinkin. There's no hawk fiercer than a liberal who's been mugged.
I doubt anyone psycho enough to shove a knife down my throat or rape my daughter is going to give a moment's rational thought to whether or not he will be executed for doing so.
I'm not surprised I agree with Ted, but I never thought I'd agree with WLM Redux in a million years (on the statstical "methodology," not his support of CP).
Get a grip, people. How the hell do you measure the number of people deterred by an execution? Give your heads a shake, and try not to rattle.