Report: "The Death Penalty: No Evidence for Deterrent"
In the 2000 Presidential debates, George Bush asserted that the "only reason to be for (the death penalty)... is because it saves other people's lives," echoing the prevalent myth that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to crime and murder.The evidence, however, overwhelmingly indicates that the death penalty has little effect on the murder rate. In 2004, as the use of the death penalty continued to decline in the United States, the number of murders and the national murder rate dropped.
A report published in April 2006 by John J. Donohue, professor at Yale Law School and Justin Wolfers, professor at the Wharton School of Business (both of whom are Research Associates at the National Bureau of Economic Research), states "...The evidence suggests that he death penalty may increase the murder rate although it remains possible that the death penalty may decrease it. If capital punishment does decrease the murder rate, any decrease is likely small."
Donohue and Wolfers offered in their report a strong critique of the statistical methods used in recent studies that purport the death penalty deters crime.
In Manhattan, the annual number of murders recently dipped below 100 for the first time since the 19th century. New York City's steady murder-rate decline began after 1990, five years before the state reinstated the death penalty. The decline in murders has continued since the law was struck down as unconstitutional in 2004.
Experts attribute the drop in murder rates to a greater police presence, fewer guns, and the decrease in random violence in the city that came with the waning of the crack epidemic (death penalty opponents often point to the wasted resources used to try a capital case and keep an inmate on death row throughout the often lengthy appellate process, which could instead be used to bolster police presence or institute health and education services and anti-drug programs, for instance, in communities nationwide).
In 2005, Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia Law School, testified the following at the Hearings of the Future of Capital Punishment in the State of New York to the New York State Assembly Standing Committee on Codes, Assembly Standing Committee on Judiciary and Assembly Standing Committee on Corrections:
"If the state is going to spend $500 million on law enforcement over the next two decades, is the best use of that money going to buy two or three executions or, for example, to fund additional police detectives, prosecutors, and judges to arrest and incarcerate murderers and other criminals who currently escape any punishment because of insufficient law-enforcement resources? Nor can we expect the almost non-existent use of the death penalty to have a deterrent effect on murder. Justice White noted long ago in Furman v. Georgia that when only a tiny proportion of the individuals who commit murder are executed, the penalty is unconstitutionally irrational: a death penalty that is almost never used serves nerves no deterrent function, because no would-be murderer can expect to be executed."
-- Alison, No Death Penalty Wisconsin
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