Capital Punishment Works
TUCKER, WILLIAM
Capital Punishment Works The states that execute murderers have seen the most rapid decline in murder rates. BY WILLIAM TUCKER Executing people for murder deters other people from committing...
...All the potential factors must be separated out before anyone can draw conclusions...
...More sophisticated evidence of deterrence is also emerging...
...Common sense would suggest to anyone that such a deterrent effect must exist...
...Since each state is, in effect, a separate experiment in the effects of capital punishment, it is more appropriate to weigh each state equally...
...Yet the results have been striking...
...If current trends continue, the divergence will disappear altogether...
...The only way to obtain proof would be to conduct a social experiment...
...Ehrlich's study was introduced in evidence before the Supreme Court when it reversed its moratorium on executions in 1976, but the paper has since been subject to endless challenge and alleged refutation...
...To put the matter simply, over the past 40 years, homicides have gone up when executions have gone down and vice versa...
...At the same time, murder rates began to plummet—to 9.6 per 100,000 in 1993, 7.7 in 1996, and 6.4 in 1999, the lowest level since 1966...
...To date, however, opponents of the death penalty have all too often simply asserted that capital punishment has been proved to lack a deterrent effect...
...Among the seven states with capital punishment but no executions, three finished with a higher rate of murder, while among the 12 states without capital punishment, five did...
...Dozens of other factors could explain these numbers...
...The closest thing to this kind of experimentation that we have is the laboratory of the states—the differing death penalty regimes of the 50 states...
...But those are the choices involved in any survey...
...Texas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Florida, Georgia, and Virginia have performed the majority of the nation's executions although Pennsylvania, Ohio, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington have had them as well...
...From 4.9 per 100,000 in 1963, they doubled to 10.1 per 100,000 in 1972, two years after the Supreme Court finally overturned all existing capital punishment statutes...
...In any case, the data are now outdated...
...This solves the problem of New York and Kansas, which fall neatly into the second category...
...States with capital punishment but no executions have lowered their homicide rate but in a more uneven pattern...
...The others are New Hampshire, Kansas, and South Dakota...
...As in the U.S...
...Does this constitute proof of deterrence...
...This solid evidence of a deterrent effect should become a part of the death penalty debate...
...In May of this year, Hashem Dezhbakhsh, Paul Rubin, and Joanna Shepherd, three Emory University economists, published an updated version of Ehrlich's analysis using county-by-county data gathered since the renewal of executions...
...And the graph that accompanied the article seemed to show homicide rates falling a lot faster in states with capital punishment than without...
...This could be seen as unrepresentative...
...After all, people do fear losing their lives...
...After all, barbarity begets barbarity...
...And based on the evidence, it's hard to see why anyone would doubt the deterrent effect of the death penalty...
...When District figures are averaged with the states lacking a death penalty, the line for jurisdictions without capital punishment is almost the same as the line for states that have capital punishment but no executions...
...Combined, these states have only 27 people on death row and have not executed anyone...
...Wisconsin and Alaska also have no death penalty...
...To the contrary, capital punishment is a social policy that achieves targeted results...
...In 1976, Isaac Ehrlich, a University of Chicago researcher in econometrics, studied month-by-month patterns of murder and executions from data extending back into the 1930s...
...The best policeman in the world is a cold night" is an old law-enforcement adage, and states with severe winters have traditionally had lower crime rates...
...Murder rates, which had trended downward since 1935, took off almost vertically after 1963, the year the Supreme Court started overturning state death penalty convictions on a routine basis...
...By the beginning of the 1990s, however, states that wished to reimpose the ultimate penalty had fought their way through the endless thicket of appeals and William Tucker is a writer living in Brooklyn...
...Homicide rates have since fallen steadily in states that have performed executions, with the downward arc beginning in 1994...
...There's no evidence of cause and effect...
...This of course means that defenders of the death penalty get cast as defenders of some barbaric ritual—as if they were in favor of sacrificing a virgin in the springtime in order to ensure a good harvest...
...By 1999, it had fallen to 6.1, below 19 other states and close to the national average of 5.7...
...The important thing is that, as crime statistics from the years subsequent to the ACLU and New York Times research have unfolded, a very interesting pattern has emerged: States with death penalties indeed started with historically higher rates of murder...
...restrictions imposed by the courts...
...This would suggest that a state's decision on whether to adopt and implement capital punishment was influenced by how serious the problem of murder was perceived to be...
...The national homicide rate reached a peak of 10.7 per 100,000 in 1980...
...Not a chance, say the critics...
...With murders down nearly 40 percent since 1991, public alarm has abated...
...The Times study is not as definitive as it may have appeared, however...
...Thirty-one states now have capital punishment and are performing executions...
...By 1993 the figure had risen to 38 executions, then 55 in 1995, and 98 in 1999, a level not seen since the 1950s...
...Almost the entire drop in Note: The figures in the graphic above were arrived at by averaging the homicide rates of the states in each group...
...The authors estimate a margin of error of plus-or-minus 10, meaning as many as 28 but no less than 8 potential victims are saved with each execution...
...States without capital punishment are generally liberal Democratic strongholds—Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, West Virginia, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, and Hawaii...
...Generally these southern states have hot weather and large African-American populations, both of which have traditionally contributed to a higher murder rate...
...BY WILLIAM TUCKER Executing people for murder deters other people from committing other murders...
...In Connecticut, for example, a jury recently refused to impose the death penalty on a 25-year-old drug dealer, already serving a 35-year sentence, who had ordered the execution of a woman and her 8-year-old son because the boy had witnessed the murder of his mother's boyfriend, for which the drug dealer's brother was being tried...
...By contrast, non-executing New Mexico, with a similar climate and demographic profile, started the decade with a rate of 9.2 per 100,000 and ended with 9.8...
...Indeed, the figures might even support the allegations of some death penalty opponents that capital punishment encourages murder...
...At the beginning of the decade, the three groups ranked in that order, top to bottom, in their rate of homicide...
...Neither the New York Times nor the ACLU includes the District of Columbia in its surveys...
...Texas has had the highest number of executions (216 since 1990) and is constantly berated for it...
...The decline might be just a coincidence...
...States with capital punishment that have not yet executed anyone tend to be states with liberal politics and large minority populations...
...With capital punishment in abeyance, homicides rapidly climbed to unprecedented heights...
...Our results suggest the legal change allowing executions beginning in 1977 has been associated with significant reductions in homicide," they conclude...
...In particular, the execution of each offender seems to save, on average, the lives of 18 potential victims...
...Death-penalty states as a group do not have lower rates of criminal homicide than non-death-penalty states," says the ACLU...
...They are scattered across the map but tend to be concentrated in the South...
...The same, of course, can be said of all statistical correlations...
...Florida (fourth in executions since 1990) has reduced its murder rate from 10.7 to 5.7...
...It used figures only through 1996, even though 1998 numbers were available...
...New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, and New Mexico are representative...
...One feature that most share is a cold climate...
...Although this heinous crime sparked a revision of the state's witness protection program, the jury did not see fit to impose the death penalty...
...But since 1994, murder rates in these states have fallen significantly, so that the gap between the two groups has been more than cut in half...
...2) states that have adopted a death penalty but have not executed anyone, and (3) states that have no death penalty...
...Senate, a homicide rate in New York (population, 18.9 million) is weighed just as heavily as that in Delaware (783,000...
...Ernest van den Haag, a supporter of the death penalty, once suggested executing people only for murders committed on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, to see if there would be any migration of violent crime to other days of the week...
...In a state-by-state analysis," said the report, "the Times found that during the last 20 years, the homicide rate in states with the death penalty has been 48 percent to 101 percent higher than in states without the death penalty...
...Since African Americans commit murder at six times the rate of other population groups, this is likely to produce lower murder rates...
...His most recent article for THE WEEKLY STANDARD was "The Tragedy of Racial Profiling" (June 18, 2001...
...And indeed, much attention has been lavished on the state-by-state figures, with the usual conclusion being that there is no deterrent effect from capital punishment, or even that executions may have a reverse effect...
...This pattern can be seen most clearly if you put the states into three categories instead of the Times's two: (1) states that execute people for murder...
...The District of Columbia—a single city (572,000) with a murder rate almost ten times the national average and higher than anywhere in the world except South Africa—is not included...
...Yet weighing the murder rates by population drowns the results from the smaller states and creates a figure determined only by a few large states...
...During the 1970s death-penalty states averaged an annual rate of 7.9 criminal homicides per 100,000 population...
...abolitionist states averaged a rate of 5.1...
...Often this is as much a reflection of jury decisions as state policies...
...Those who would use this opportunity to abolish capital punishment must reckon with the innocent lives that will be lost if they succeed...
...In 1991, the state's murder rate was 15.3 per 100,000, second in the nation only to Louisiana...
...New York's tumbling rate of crime would have had a considerable effect on the results obtained...
...And after a decade of dalliance when states condemned over 2,000 to death but executed only a handful, the rate was still at 10.5 per 100,000 in 1991...
...The ACLU, which lists execution-versus-murder-rate statistics on its website to prove "Capital Punishment is Not a Deterrent to Murder," stopped counting in 1995...
...The all-time high of 200 executions occurred in 1935...
...Indeed, 10 of the 12 states without capital punishment have homicide rates below the national average, . . . while half the states with the death penalty have homicide rates above the national average . . . suggesting to many experts that the threat of the death penalty rarely deters criminals...
...But such experiments would be completely unethical...
...Whether it is wrong to execute people who are retarded, whether the indigent get sufficient legal counsel, whether African Americans are over- or underrepresented on death row, the role of DNA evidence in death-row cases—all these are questions to be debated on their merits...
...In 1991, 14 murderers were executed while 2,500 waited on death row...
...Finally, the Times decided to leave New York and Kansas out of its survey, because these two states had adopted the death penalty only in the 1990s...
...Among the 31 states with executions, only four had a higher rate of murder at the end of the decade than at the beginning...
...Its very success is what now allows people to talk about some of its secondary aspects in a tranquil environment...
...All of these states (except Michigan) also have relatively small African-American populations...
...In September 2000, the New York Times announced on the front page that its own survey had reached identical conclusions...
...States with no capital punishment saw a slight decline that was almost completely wiped out by an upswing in 1999...
...murder rates over the past decade has occurred in states with capital punishment, with the biggest decrease seen in states that are executing people...
...Murder rates in states that execute people were twice as high as in states without capital punishment, while states with capital punishment that have not yet executed anyone fell almost exactly in the middle...
...He found a deterrent effect of about eight murders for every execution...
Vol. 6 • August 2001 • No. 45
