RALEIGH – Knowing that some passionate death-penalty foes read my column, and fearful of triggering any adverse health consequence, I am issuing this advisory before proceeding with today’s piece:
Please take a deep, cleansing breath. Sit down completely in a comfortable chair. Do not attempt to lift heavy objects or operate complex machinery while reading. Do not attempt to drink a beverage while reading. Chill.
Pepperdine University professors Roy Adler and Michael Summers have conducted new research on the question of whether executing murderers has a deterrent effect on prospective murderers. They concluded in the affirmative. Citing a statistical analysis of execution and murder data from 1979 to 2004, they found that each execution was associated with an average of 74 fewer murders the following year.
It is possible to justify capital punishment even if it has no deterrence value. Indeed, I’d continue to support it under such conditions because I believe that for some egregious murders, there is simply no just punishment other than execution. Life in prison doesn’t fit the crime. Furthermore, it only reduces, but does not eliminate, the risk that the murderer will kill again. He may kill another inmate. Or a future government may parole him, regardless of what the current policy or sentence is.
But obviously, the likelihood that the death penalty deters some murderers – typically those committed by career criminals in the midst of another felony, such as robbery or rape, rather than crimes of passion – is a matter of great importance in the debate about capital punishment. Some pacifists would oppose the state executing murderers anyway, despite the fact that it saves innocent lives, but they are a tiny minority of the population. No longer, as Adler and Summers put it, is the question simply about whether to save the life of a single (convicted) person. Instead, it is a question of whether it is right to take the life of that person based on the probability that dozens of innocents lives might be saved in the future.
Let me hasten to add that I don’t think the Adler/Summers finding would alone prove the existence of a deterrent effect. For one thing, they appear to have studied data for the U.S. as a whole, which includes both states that execute and states that don’t. Many believe that one should evaluate capital punishment only within state boundaries. That has its own disadvantage, however: many fewer cases to study. A given state will have only a small number of executions a year, reducing the data points so much that statistically significant conclusions are hard to come by.
Fortunately, there are other reasons to believe that, on balance, capital punishment deters. Some are, indeed, studies of trends within capital-punishment states alone, or careful comparisons of execution and non-execution states. But another is, to be blunt, the logic of felony murder. If you think about it, it is extremely unlikely that criminals in the midst of committing robberies and rapes don’t know or care about the probability of being apprehended, tried, convicted, and executed if one of their victims dies during the commission of that crime. A dead victim tells no tales. In a state where the prospect of felony murder will earn you additional prison time, but not death, there is unfortunately less of a disincentive to silence the witness.
Naturally, one can agree with everything I’m saying and still favor suspending executions in North Carolina on the grounds that legal representation is inadequate, juries and prosecutors are biased, the justice system requires reform, etc. I don’t happen to agree, but I understand that is possible.
It is undeniable, however, that most of the energy sustaining the moratorium movement derives from those who think capital punishment is morally wrong. And most of them have concluded that on the assumption that the death penalty doesn’t deter, that it doesn’t save lives.
What if it does?
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.