Deep Dish:
The death penalty increases homicide rates and homicide rates increase by four percent during and for several months after high-profile death penalty cases. This counter-deterrence is called the brutalization effect. Whenever the death penalty has been repealed, homicide rates decrease.
Horaholic:
I think your point about homicide rates increasing where there is a death penalty involved is a clinching argument, along with the fact that it costs more money to kill them, than to lock them away for life. Where did you get the 'brutalization' statistics? That makes me curious.
For certainty, the specific statistic of four percent was referring only to high-profile death penalty cases. Second, I checked into matters and the statistic needs rewording (the OP was written off the top of my head).
"If capital punishment is a deterrent, the reasoning goes, then its impact should be greatest after a well-publicized execution. Robert Dann began testing this assumption in 1935 when he chose five highly publicized executions of convicted murderers in different years and determined the number of homicides in the 60 days before and after each execution. Each 120-day period had approximately the same number of homicides, as well as the same number of days on which homicides occurred. Dann's study revealed that an average of 4.4 more homicides than during those preceding it, suggesting that the overall impact of executions might actually be an increase in the incidence of homicide." (1)(2)
In 1998, Northeastern University researchers William Bowers and Glenn Pierce analyzed homicide rates in New York from 1909-1963 and found "on the average, two additional homicides in the month after an execution. Controls for time trends, seasonality, the effects of war, and adjustments for autocorrelation tend to confirm this finding."
(3) Moreover, executions add "roughly three more to the number of homicides in the next nine months of the year after the execution."
(4). (In other words, two in the first month and one more in the following eight months.)
I also need to correct myself by saying homicide rates do not necessarily decrease when the death penalty is abolished, but rather homicide rates more often decrease than increase. Northeastern University professors Dane Archer, Rosemary Gartner, and Marc Beittel studied twelves countries which abolished the death penalty at some time: Austria (1968), Canada (1976), Denmark (1930), England and Wales (1965), Finland (1949), Israel (1954), Italy (1890), Netherland Antilles (1957), Norway (1905), Sweden (1921), and Switzerland (1942)
(5). Their findings were homicide rates dropped in seven countries and increased in five, concluding homicide rates were unaffected by the death penalty and rather influenced by spurious factors
(6). To give one example:
Contrary to predictions by death penalty supporters, the homicide rate in Canada did not increase after abolition in 1976. In fact, the Canadian murder rate declined slightly the following year (from 2.8 per 100,000 to 2.7). Over the next 20 years the homicide rate fluctuated (between 2.2 and 2.8 per 100,000), but the general trend was clearly downwards. It reached a 30-year low in 1995 (1.98) -- the fourth consecutive year-to-year decrease and a full one-third lower than in the year before abolition. In 1998, the homicide rate dipped below 1.9 per 100,000, the lowest rate since the 1960s. (7)
Moving onward...
Da Realist:
If the government... allows even one to get back out to be able to terrorize people, the government isn't doing it's job. That's when ordinary people would have the right to capture the person and kill him or her themselves.
Capture, I agree. Murder, no -- not unless in direct self-defense (as opposed to pre-emptive self-defense).
The justice system is not about deterring crime; it's retribution.
Correction and deterrence, but not retribution. The death penalty is the only punishment which is based upon the philosophy of retribution. All others are not. Do we kidnap the children of kidnappers? Do we scorch the homes of arsonists? Do we steal from robbers?
piranha45:
I think we need to go back to medieval era justice systems. I read that in Saudi Arabia where, upon conviction of something serious like murder, you are given 7 days to live and then get your head chopped off in public. I'm all for that. The Islamic countries have a definite edge over the West in respect to criminal justice, as far as I'm concerned. Yes, no system is perfect, some of the innocent may be slain along with the guilty, but such is the price of order in society; you have to be ruthless with people.
Your line of thinking strikes of barbarianism. It is the proper role of the government to base social policies upon reason, rationality, and to protect society essentially from itself, to protect against the barbaric impulses and prejudices of the general public. There are in fact a multitude of reasons why innocent people are convicted of murder despite the "beyond a reasonable doubt" burden of proof — and it is most certainly irrational to execute innocent people. The reasons for miscarriages of justice include: shoddy investigations and misconduct by the police, eyewitness misidentifications and perjury by prosecution witnesses, false confessions, guilty pleas by innocent defendants, prosecutor misconduct, judicial misconduct or error, bad defense lawyers, and jury problems. Defendants are very often indigent and cannot afford proper legal defense. Trials are hardly scientific. Although trials attempt to use science, the scientific opinions are largely based upon which defendants can afford to hire an expert for their side—so if the evidence is fallacious or unreliable and you cannot afford a lawyer, you're screwed, both in conviction and appeal. This long and time-consuming legal process of appeals is necessary to give time for miscarriages to
hopefully be found, but by no means are all miscarriages found.
Moreover, in
Trop v. Dulles (1958), the US Supreme Court opined there are "evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society." It would be irrational for society to degrade and revert our sense of civility back towards medieval times. " You said, "Some of the innocent may be slain along with the guilty, but such is the price of order in society; you have to be ruthless with people"? Again, your thinking strikes of barbarianism.
Citations
1. Larry Siegel.
Criminology. Eighth edition. 2003. Wadsworth.
2. Robert Dann. "The deterrent effect of capital punishment."
Friends Social Service Series 29. 1935.
3. William Bowers and Glenn Pierce.
"Deterrence or Brutalization: What Is the Effect of Executions?".
Crime and Delinquency 26:453-484. 1980.
4. Ibid.
5. Diane Archer, et al. "Homicide and the Death Penalty: A Cross-National Test of a Deterrence Hypothesis." Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 74:991-1013. 1983.
6. Glenn Walters. Foundations of Criminal Science: The Development of Knowledge. Greenwood Publishing Group. 1992.
7. Amnesty International Canada. "The Death Penalty in Canada: Twenty Years of Abolition".
