Bill Snedden

Understanding that you mean "deterrence" as "deterrence over and above any alternatives", okay. Thanks for clarifying.

Understanding again that "deterrence" means "deterrence over and above the any alternatives", I don't see that the evidence is clear and unambiguous at all.

Human psychology is extremely complex. We don't always know with reasonable certainty why some people commit murders, much less what might deter them from doing so. It seems to me that such an argument presumes to say "ceteris paribus, people will not commit murders if they believe that they might themselves pay the ultimate penalty." The problem here is that with murder, as with many violent crimes, there is no ceteris paribus. In many, if not most, cases, murderers and other violent criminals don't stop to consider the consequences of their actions. They're acting out of desparation, or mental defect, or fear, or find themselves caught in situations out of which they have no good choices, etc., etc. People in such situations don't always (maybe even don't usually) act rationally, and such an argument presumes a rational state of mind; one that is capable of considering consequences.

To be sure, some people committing these crimes are coldly rational. The man who plots his wife's murder for insurance money for instance. Such an argument might apply to him, but is he in the majority? Would it even really apply to him? Is our understanding of human psychology great enough to make these judgements?

I don't know, but I don't think it's unreasonable to question the possibility.

Remote? What's an acceptable number of innocent people put to death?

If I could immediately eliminate hunger in all the world by killing an innocent child, would it be morally acceptable to do so?

To the extent that I might accidentally cause the death of an innocent, I would feel great remorse. If I felt there were a realistic possibility of causing an innocent person's death, I would stop driving.

With CP, I feel there is a realistic possibility of causing an innocent person's death and therefore we should discontinue it.

Of course, but all punishment (including CP) is both. We enforce penalties to stop the criminals from committing additional crimes as well as to attempt to deter future ones.

My point was that unless one alternative is assumed or proven to have a greater deterrent effect, the outcome is the same. As the "greater deterrent effect" is one of the factors on which we don't agree, that can't simply be assumed, and it certainly hasn't been proven.

As a "reasonable" person, I agree that the death of an innocent outweighs the death of a brutal murderer. However, I find the following chain of reasoning to be morally suspect:

P1) CP may deter the murders of innocents
P2) CP may involve the execution of innocents
P3) The material benefit of deterrence outweighs P2.
C1) The execution of innocents is acceptable if it is in the interest of deterring the deaths of other innocents.

"You can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs" seems a poor consolation to the mother whose son has been wrongfully executed...

Regards,

Bill Snedden

Emily

I am totally agaist testing for animals. As a substutut for testing on animals I beleive prisoners should be tested on instead. It makes perfect sense. To bad people are so ignorent. "Lets feel sorry for the prisoner that raped and killed a little girl""testing products on prisoners like catholic preists that like little boys is inhuman""blahblahblah"why feel sorry for them? who cares if they are put to death or tortured. Maybe peope are just agaist giving prisoners what they deserve because thier momma is a mass murderer. anyways, I beleive prisoners should eather be tested on, or givin the death penalty. One reason the death penalty is great, is because then you dont have to worry about some psychopath being let out of prison after 20 years or something. this actually happens alot. would you not be pissed if your daughter was brutally murdered and her killer was let go after 20 years? If they were put to death things like this would never happen.

Mike Rosoft

I still don’t follow you. First off, the death penalty is certainly different from other penalties actually used in our legal system: it’s more severe. But how does it follow from this that it should never be imposed?

Because it is MUCH more severe than any form of imprisonment: it takes away the sentenced person's life.

Six months in jail is a more severe penalty than a $5 fine, but it doesn’t seem to me that it follows that a penalty of six months in jail ought never be imposed.

Once again, there are higher fines out there, as well as lesser prison terms. I can even go as far as to say that a one-day prison term and a 1000$ fine may be comparable punishments. (Shift the numbers up or down as much as you want.) Hence, the argument doesn't apply to this situation.

As for “there is no way to fairly decide between death penalty and life imprisonment”, is this statement even meaningful, and if so, what does it mean?

It means that death penalty says: "This person can never be corrected and must be put to death," which we don't know. On the other hand, life imprisonment with a possibility of conditional release after twenty years says: "We believe that this person can never be corrected. But we might be wrong."

By the way, did you read the Amnesty International's report I have offered to you?

Yes. Most of the objections there are not to capital punishment per se but to inappropriate applications of it.

Agreed. But many are applicable to death penalty in general. Especially these ones: Brutalizing, Futile, Dehumanizing, and Irrevocable.

The possibility is real, but very remote. There is not a single known case of an innocent person being executed in the U.S. since 1900, in spite of the best efforts of the anti-DP crowd to find one.

You have already got a response from EverlastingTongue. I can only add that Amnesty International also addresses this issue:
There is an estimate that about twenty innocent people were executed during the past 100 years. (Sorry, I don't have a source.)


Mike Rosoft

Mike Rosoft

Emily, your argument cannot be taken seriously. Even a criminal is a human: he has the right to a fair trial (because he might be innocent), and to be treated humanely.

Maybe peope are just agaist giving prisoners what they deserve because thier momma is a mass murderer. - sic

I assure you, my mother is not a mass murderer. (Ad hominem, anyone?)

would you not be pissed if your daughter was brutally murdered and her killer was let go after 20 years?

I would hope that they know what they are doing. It is not so rare that after being released, a murderer becomes a decent member of the society.


Mike Rosoft

bd-from-kg

Alonzo Fyfe:

I’ve finally found time to reply at more length to your hypothesis that the death penalty, far from reducing murder rate, might actually increase it.

But first a few words about terminology. A threatened punishment for a certain kind of act is a deterrent if it provides a motivation for someone not to do the kind of thing in question. But there are ways other than threatening punishment to suppress a certain type of act. For example, one might simply arrange things so that there are fewer occasions on which it is even possible, or one might make it less attractive by appropriate social conditioning. such measures cannot be properly said to deter the kind of act in question even though they might often prevent it.

Now in the death penalty debate the vast majority of participants take it for granted that either the death penalty is a deterrent and reduces the murder rate or it’s not a deterrent and does not reduce the murder rate. Very few people take seriously the idea that the threat of execution has some subtle, hitherto unheard of perverse effect that causes it to increase the murder rate, or that would do so if it weren’t for an offsetting deterrent effect. Thus the question of whether the death penalty is a deterrent is taken to be equivalent to the question of whether it reduces the murder rate. But since your whole point is to question this basic assumption we need to use new terminology to distinguish between these questions. I propose to say that a measure or effect is a suppressant if it reduces the frequency of the relevant kind of act and an enhancer if it increases this frequency. Thus in this terminology your argument is that the DP has some kind of “enhancement effect” the perversely increases the murder rate rather than increasing it as one would naturally expect.

The most important thing to keep in mind about your hypothesis that the DP has an enhancement effect at least as strong as its deterrent effect, as I’ve pointed out several times, is that it makes an extraordinary claim. It’s extraordinary because it flies in the face of common sense and an overwhelming amount of human experience in such matters. It’s practically unheard of that establishing a reward for a certain category of acts decreases the number of such acts or that establishing a sanction against certain types of acts increases their frequency. It’s even more unheard of when the reward or sanction is a very strong one. When confronted with such claims, the rational response is: “prove it!” The burden of proof is on the person who makes an extraordinary claim, and (as has been pointed out many times in these forums) extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

So, what kind of evidence do we have (besides the evidence from the most fundamental principles of human psychology) as to whether capital punishment has a suppression or enhancement effect? Well, basically we have statistical data. This comes in two flavors: foreign and domestic. (I’m an American, so of course “foreign” here refers to countries other than the U.S.)

Let’s look at the foreign data first. This data is almost always “aggregated”, which tends to disguise any effect that might exist, and the techniques used to analyze it have been comparatively primitive. I have seen no attempt to do a serious regression analysis on “other country” data, much less one that’s anywhere near as sophisticated as the kind used by Erlich, to say nothing of the even more advanced ones used (in conjunction with much better data) in the more recent U.S. studies.

There are other problems with foreign data. The first is the obvious fact that other countries are different. Their laws are different, their cultures are different, their mores are different. For all of these reasons data from other countries may not be applicable to this country. Moreover, I’m not nearly as familiar with other countries as I am with the U.S., so there could be factors responsible for any trends observed in another country that I know nothing about, but which would be well-known to a resident of that country.

Yet another problem with foreign statistics is that they simply cannot be trusted. Many countries have no compunction about massaging their official statistics to make themselves look good or to further some ideological agenda. Even Great Britain is far from fastidious about reporting accurate crime statistics, as this story from Newsmax shows:

For all of these reasons I think that statistics from other countries are of little or no value. Why look at statistics from Britain or France or South Africa when we have U.S. data which is better than that available from anywhere else, which is much more likely to be accurate, which is directly relevant to the question of whether the United States should have a death penalty, and where I have some basic understanding of the country and thus some hope of understanding what’s really going on?

So what about the U.S. statistics? Here the “no suppression” theory runs into serious problems, because in recent years several papers have been published using advanced statistical techniques on the latest data, which is clearly qualitatively much better than the data available for previous studies, and these studies support the suppression hypothesis unequivocally. So those who wish to argue that the death penalty does not reduce the murder rate are forced to argue that these results carry little weight. But this implies that past studies that found little or no suppression effect carry even less weight, since they were less sophisticated and were based on vastly inferior data.

To illustrate this point, consider one of the main criticisms of the Erlich paper. The critics pointed out that small technical changes in the model produce entirely different results – i.e., the alleged suppression effect disappears. But Erlich’s results showed an effect of about eight innocent lives saved for each execution, which is a pretty strong effect. Now if the quality of the data is so poor, or the “noise level” so high, that the results of the analysis depend decisively on exactly what model is used even if there’s really a strong effect, the only rational conclusion is that no meaningful results can be obtained from this kind of analysis – at least using the kind of data that Erlich was using.

Thus the statistical evidence that’s currently available does not (IMHO) even begin to meet the kind of burden of proof required to support this kind of claim. In fact, in my judgment the statistical evidence, on balance, supports the suppression hypothesis at the moment, although this wasn’t true until fairly recently. But even if the balance were somewhat in favor of the null hypothesis (no suppression), that wouldn’t do. Your extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof, which clearly isn’t there and never was. What you have is some airy speculations not supported (to my knowledge) by any psychological studies whatsoever and some highly ambiguous statistical data which can be read at least as plausibly as evidence for a net suppression effect as evidence against it.

So we conclude that while the “no suppression” hypothesis would need extraordinarily good evidence to justify rational acceptance, in fact it has little or no evidence to support it.

Although it's not really necessary at this point, I plan to analyze your proposed “enhancement effects" further in my next post.

bd-from-kg

Mike Rosoft:

Supposing that to be true [some here seem to disagree], how does it follow that it should never be imposed? I kind of thought that was the point of the DP.

What argument would that be? So far all I’ve seen is a total non sequitur.

Nope, it doesn’t say that. It says, “All things considered, putting this person to death appears to be the best course of action.”

Nope, it doesn’t say that. It says, “All things considered, sentencing this person to life with possible parole appears to be the best course of action.”

Don’t presume to say what other people’s reasons are for doing what they do, or for favoring this policy or that. It’s just barely possible that someone might favor the death penalty in one cases, life with parole in another, and life without parole in a third simply because he feels that these are the just, appropriate punishments in each case.

I didn’t say “all”, I said “most”. (There were a lot of objections in that article.) And thanks for reminding me of still more reasons that many people have for opposing the death penalty which have nothing to do with opposition to killing people per se. I’ll use them in my next response to Alonzo.

This answer is nonsensical. If death penalty opponents don’t have time to make their case, what do they have time for? Are they busy trying to break into the prisons where the executions are taking place and trying to stop them? Give me a break.

It’s beyond understanding why AI thinks that new cases of this kind will miraculously come to light as a result of abolishing the DP. What does the one have to do with the other? Where’s the causal relationship?

Wow. I’m impressed. I estimate that perhaps one innocent person was executed during that time. Sorry, I don’t have a source either.

everlastingtongue

bd-from-kg,

So any comparison between U.S. and international murder rates versus executions is automatically invalid? Are Americans, and American culture that drastically different from any other nation?

So how do we estimate the results of capital punishment? Capital punishment has been an institution in this nation except for the brief period between 1972, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional, and 1976, when it was declared constitutional again. Execution rates have varied, but only in these few years was it actually illegal. Sure we could compare murder rates of any period of time against 1972-1976, but I would think that any number of social issues and events would invalidate any reasonable analysis. How can we reasonably compare the effects of capital punishment using only U.S. statistics, when capital punishment has existed for the duration of our nation? What do we compare it to?

Of course State laws are varied, and have varied over time, but I would contend that culture can vary as much by U.S. State as much as you contend they do by nations – 1962 Alabama, Mississippi, or Georgia, for example, were worlds apart from 1962 California, New York, or Connecticut. So does that invalidate any U.S. statistics from 1962? I’m not passing judgment, but to argue that the cultures were mostly alike is a losing proposition.

I can’t understand why you consider international statistics so invalid. I’ve seen the points you made, but do you really think that the U.S. is the only nation that provides honest information? Everyone else lies but us?

bd-from-kg

Bill Snedden:

What is it that you don’t see? Sure, human psychology is complex. But some aspects of it are very simple, elementary, and practically universal. Human nature is not so complicated that there are no valid generalizations about it; the entire legal system is built around some of them. If human nature were completely unpredictable it would be impossible to have a legal system at all. People would be just as likely to desire to be forced to cough up their money as to be allowed to keep it; as likely to appreciate being deprived of their freedom as to experience it as a punishment; as likely to long to be executed as to want desperately to avoid it. But we all know that the real world isn’t like that. People don’t like having their assets confiscated; they hate being locked up; they have a powerful desire to stay alive. What’s more, if they have to choose, they will predictably choose to pay a fine rather than go to jail, and to go to jail rather than be executed. Is this really as much of a mystery to you as you pretend?

The Death Penalty and Sentencing Information paper cited several times before suggests a simple thought experiment for anyone who still has doubts about this:

Another straightforward demonstration is to ask any prosecutor in a death-penalty state whether he’s ever secured a guilty plea by offering a sentence of life in prison instead of a possible death sentence. Then ask him whether he’s ever considered securing a guilty plea by offering a death sentence instead of life in prison.

This is not rocket science, folks. This is not a deep mystery. It’s ridiculously simple; almost embarrassingly elementary.

For those of the “I-won’t-believe-that-grass-is-green-unless-you-can-cite-a-scientific-study-proving-it school of thought, there are a number of studies that show conclusively that the DP is a deterrent at the individual level. From the same paper:

At some point even an alien from Arcturus, who knows nothing whatsoever about life on earth from everyday experience, will be forced to conclude that grass is indeed green and that a death threat is indeed a deterrent..

You say:

If a man kidnaps a young girl, subjects her to horrible sexual abuse for weeks, then tortures her mercilessly until she dies, I’m not going to be terribly concerned about whether he stopped to consider the consequences of his actions.

You see, your criterion is the wrong one. The correct criterion is whether the person in question had the opportunity and mental capacity to reflect on the possible consequences of his action, not whether he actually did so. If not, this is a mitigating factor, not an exculpatory one, but it’s enough of a factor so that the death penalty is almost always inappropriate in these circumstances. But that’s exactly what the statutes say; such crimes are not capital offenses.

Moreover, your claim that this applies to “many, if not most” cases is demonstrably false. The vast majority of serious crimes are planned. And part of the planning involves figuring out how to avoid getting caught. It is a reasonable hypothesis that criminals try to commit crimes in ways that minimize their chances of being apprehended because they are aware of the possible consequences of their actions and fear them.

You say:

Are we wise enough to dispense cosmic justice? No. We’re human; sometimes we’ll err. Perhaps we should dismantle the entire legal system since human judgment is imperfect. Maybe we should just let God sort everything out.

If what you’re questioning is whether we’re capable of dispensing perfect justice, that’s perfectly reasonable. But if you’re questioning whether we should attempt to dispense justice at all on the grounds that humans are fallible, you’ve gone off the deep end. We have no choice but to do the best we can.

The implication here, I gather, is that the only acceptable number is zero. That’s absurd. It would only make sense if every human life had infinite value.

Of course! Why in the world wouldn’t it be?

I suspect that you’re thinking about a case where you would know the identity of the child who would be killed; that you would deliberately kill a specific individual in cold blood. Reasonable people can differ about that. (Although it’s hard to see how one could conclude that it would be wrong on the basis of a consequentialist moral theory, and it’s hard to see how a deontological theory could be justified on a non-theistic basis.) But the case we’re talking about here is a no-brainer by comparison. It’s more analogous to ending world hunger by taking measures that will predictably result in the death of some unknown innocent child somewhere, not deliberately, with malice aforethought, but by accident, unintentionally. Why in the world would you hesitate to do this? We all participate in practices that we know will cause the death of innocents, to achieve things far less worthwhile than ending world hunger. For example, we drive by the tens of thousands to see a football game in person (even though we could watch it on television) knowing full well that some innocent children will killed as a result.

But it wouldn’t cause you any remorse at all to let an innocent child die that you could have saved?

Then you’d better stop driving, because there is a realistic possibility that you’ll do just that. My brother once caused the death of an innocent person while driving, even though he did nothing wrong. The possibility isn’t nearly as remote as you seem to imagine.

Maybe we should turn off all the electrical power stations, because there’s more than a realistic possibility that operating even one of them will cause an innocent child’s death; it’s virtually certain that it will cause a number of such deaths.

Wrong. What matters is whether one regime does in fact have a greater deterrent effect. What you do or do not assume does not affect the reality. And the probability that the outcome is the same is extremely small.

If absolute proof were required for every factual premise before the government could act, we might as well abolish the government, because it would be unable to do anything at all. The correct criterion for public policy questions is the preponderance of evidence, not absolute proof, or even “proof beyond a reasonable doubt”.

Good. Then you agree with my reasoning. I certainly agree that if, based on what we know, the expected number of deaths of innocents caused by capital punishment exceeded the expected number of deaths of innocents that it would save, this would invalidate the argument. But I don’t see how a rational person can believe this, any more than I can see how any rational person can believe that a man who had been dead for over a day walked out of his tomb two thousand years ago. To be sure, apparently a good many people do believe both of these things, but that doesn’t make the beliefs rational.

I concur. This chain of so-called reasoning appears to be completely incoherent; the conclusion appears to be a total non sequitur.

But it does suggest a different chain of reasoning that might have some merit:

P1) CP deters the murders of innocents
P2) CP involves the execution of a much smaller number of innocents.
P3) Given two courses of action that both involve the loss of innocent lives, other things being equal the one that involves the death of the fewest innocents is preferable.
C1: Other things being equal, a CP regime is preferable to a non-CP regime.

This argument is clearly valid, at any rate. And the only moral premise (P3) seems to me to be beyond serious controversy.

Bill Snedden

I never said it was completely unpredictable nor do I believe that it's a complete mystery. However, your argument seems to depend upon there being a simple relationship: "I don't want to die myself, therefore I won't do anything that has a reasonable probability of getting myself killed." I don't find this a reasonable assumption at all and believe that it underestimates the complexity of the human psyche.

Consider the not insignificant number of people who participate in so-called "extreme sports". They climb mountains, jump out of planes, bungee jump, etc. All of which carry some probability of death greater than that of "non-extreme" sports like tennis or football. Obviously there is some benefit of participation that outweighs a very real expectation that they might end up dead.

I think it very true that people often behave irrationally, especially at times of great stress (like strong emotions or psychological conflict). It is very often the case (most often, I'd argue) that situations that end in murder are examples of such. The case you've built for DP serving as a deterrent (in the absence of conclusive confirming data) depends upon an individual's ability to rationally consider alternatives. I don't think that's a reasonable assumption to make in the case of murder or other violent crimes.

Unfortunately, I don't find that convincing for the reason I cited, above. It assumes that killers will stop to question their motives and consider if the act is one worth dying for. I'm not sure that's a reasonable assumption considering the tendency of humans to behave in other than their best interests in stressful or conflicted situations.

Consider also the case of a vast majority of Christians, who believe that unrepentant sinners will be cast into the lake of fire, and yet who commit some sin or another every day of their life. They seem assured of salvation even though it irrationally conflicts with the belief system they claim to have.

Many people seem to hold an irrational belief that bad things just can't happen to them. In spite of all evidence to the contrary.

That's almost an insult bd, and I expect better of you.

I find this part most interesting:

Several salient points are made:

"When the death penalty becomes real..." Which is to say, after the fact.

"...fear of execution did not deter those murderers from committing..."

"...as the probability of that punishment rises for those murderers, even they show a great fear..." Again, after the fact.

They then conclude: "...the effect of deterrence will rise as the probability of executions rise." But this is a non-sequitur. It simply doesn't follow from the previous part of the paragraph. We're talking about murderers after the fact, who are now out of whatever circumstances surrounded their acts; able to more calmly and rationally contemplate their fate. Of course they're concerned about dying now.

The paragraph concludes, "...that which we fear the most, deters the most." Well why didn't it deter those murderers from committing their murders? Could it be that they were somehow less "afraid" of it in the circumstances in which they committed the act than they are now sitting in a jail cell?

Neither am I. That wasn't my point. I'm concerned as to whether or not putting people to death will have a higher probability of preventing that man from committing his act than life imprisonment. Right now I don't see any reason to believe that it will.

One can have the "opportunity and mental capacity" to reflect and still fail to do so. Otherwise rational people seem often to act irrationally under great stress or in times of psychological conflict. Such actions do not fall under statutes designed to set aside "lack of capacity" issues, but they do go directly to whether or not CP is a deterrent over and above LIP.

I'm not sure what you mean by "planned" and how that applies to "aware of the possible consequences". Jeffrey Dahmer certainly planned his crimes, but was his awareness of the possibility of apprehension and consequences rational?

That's not the best example, but we might also consider the case of a husband so enraged by his wife's infidelity that he decides to kill her. He might take some care to plan the killing so as to avoid capture, but how rationally is he really considering all the alternatives?

Please bd, there's no need to be flip. No one's asking for "cosmic justice", whatever that might mean, but if there is the possibility that there might be a serious flaw in the manner in which we have chosen to dispense justice, we are morally compelled to examine that possibility. Otherwise, "justice" isn't very just.

The former, and not the latter, although I'm not questioning at all. I don't believe that it is possible to dispense perfect justice. With that in mind, however, I would like to do everything possible to mitigate harm or negative consequences of otherwise well-intentioned acts.

But, bd, in a sense, every human life does have infinite value: to the person who holds it. My life is the only one I get.

Why should it matter whether or not I would know the child?

And we are deliberately killing specific individuals in cold blood. That's what execution is.

Well, it's nice to see that you agree that reasonable people can differ about something!

I disagree. In the case of CP, the death of an innocent is not an unintended consequence. Death is the expected outcome of the penalty. Death is intended, it's only the innocence that is not.

In these other cases, death is certainly not an intended consequence. They are therefore materially different and I don't think the analogy stands.

If I could have saved that child without having to sacrifice others, certainly. But we're not talking about that.

As a member of a democratic society, I am to a certain extent morally culpable for the actions taken by my government; a government of, by, and for the people, of which I am one. I cannot in good conscience affirm a process of state-supported killing with the knowledge that it is likely that an innocent will be among those killed. Not if there are options available.

I don't agree nor do I feel that the evidence supports such a conclusion.

Again, I disagree. I believe that the consequences in question in this particular instance demand that we should seek "proof beyond a reasonable doubt."

No, you misunderstood my meaning. It doesn't matter if the number of lives saved by deterrence outweighs the number of lives lost through execution of innocents. I'm not a utilitarian nor am I some sort of actuary. I don't believe human lives can be simply totalled up and the side with more wins. The needs of the many simply do not outweigh the needs of the few; not when the few have no choice in the matter.

My position, simply, is this: if there is a reasonable alternative that yields comparable results, then CP should be eliminated insofar as it is impossible to prevent the execution of innocents.

To be sure, there are some hidden premises (that I thought would be understood), but incoherent is a bit strong. But, you've apparently fleshed out the hidden premises in your own presentation.

In this case, I don't agree that "other things" are at all equal.

In the case of CP, the state, and it's citizens by extension, are morally culpable for the death of innocents executed in error. But the state (and citizens) is not so culpable for the deaths of innocents killed by murderers who were not deterred from killing due to lack of CP. All things being equal, I believe that we are morally compelled to do no harm, not to prevent all harm. To the extent that we can do so we should strive to prevent harm whenever we can, but not at the expense of other innocent lives.

Like I said, "you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs" seems like a poor response to a mother whose innocent son has been executed...

This discussion, between you and I anyway, grew out of your statement that "reasonable people should support CP". I hope that you can see that reasonable people might still find reasons not to support it and that it is possible for reasonable people to differ on this issue.

Regards,

Bill Snedden

NHGH

Let me start by saying that I share your skepticism about statistical analyses of the deterrent effect of the death penalty, not only because of the difficulty in finding suitable groups of people to compare which is common in the social sciences, but because the issue attracts so many ideologues on both sides that virtually any study on the death penalty has to be scrutinized with extra-special care in order to ferret out possible distortions and biases, unconscious or otherwise. That said, I'm not convinced by your argument from human nature that the death penalty is a significant deterrent above and beyond what life imprisonment would be, and I think the thought experiment you cite here helps to make my point:

Now, let's assume that all murderers, upon commiting their murders, would be instantly teleported into a maximum-security prison, where they would remain permanently, with no hope of release. Do you think there would be any more murders under this scheme than under the thought experiment as originally proposed?

I think you could plausibly argue that there might be fewer murders under such a scheme. The number of persons who actually commit murder with the specific intention of being sentenced to death is vanishingly small, but there do seem to be a few (I believe an AI report was previously cited on this point; note, however, that we must be careful to distinguish between persons who commit the crime specifically to receive the penalty, and those who subsequently choose execution as the lesser of two evils). How many people do you suppose commit murder with the specific intention of being sent to prison for life?

At any rate, I don't think that anyone would deliberately plan and commit a murder, facing either of those penalties, unless they were virtually certain that they would get away with the crime. I think that when the degree of punishment reaches a certain threshold, further increases are superfluous (and furthermore, changing the penalty from life imprisonment to death does not always constitute an "increase" in the relevant sense, as I point out below).

This "demonstration" is irrelevant. The administration of the death penalty is heavily regulated, I believe, in all states in which it is practiced; when capital punishment was allowed again by the Supreme Court in 1976, it was with the understanding that there would be strict standards concerning its application. That's one of the reasons for the extra expense: death sentences must be handed down by a jury (or at least a jury must make a recommendation; there may be one or two states where the judge has the power to override); there are mandatory appeals, etc.

Thus, a prosecutor cannot offer a death sentence as part of a deal even if the defendant were receptive (and I refer you again to the item I cited several days earlier on page 1 of this discussion, indicating that 1 in 8 people executed in this country in the last 25 years has been a volunteer--a small, but significant minority).

It's worth pointing out here that a defense attorney has wide latitude to conduct his client's defense as he sees fit. As reprehensible as it may seem, he has authority (among other things) to argue for a life sentence rather than execution even if that goes against his client's express wishes. I don't think that happens the majority of the time, but it cannot be entirely discounted either.

I might also add that if it's only "[w]hen the death penalty becomes real" (in the sense of potentially imminent, as in the penalty phase of a murder trial) that "murderers fear it the most", that would seem to me to be an argument against its effectiveness as a deterrent.

As I said above, I'm loath to draw firm conclusions from studies of these sort, which are frequently conducted by less-than-impartial researchers. Still, I think a couple of comments are in order here:

1) It's not clear what penalties were faced by the criminals who claimed to be deterred from murder by the threat of capital punishment. I'd agree that the death penalty probably has a greater deterrent effect than a short- to medium-length prison sentence.

2) The fact that prisoners may rate the death penalty as more severe than life without parole is not something that I think can be safely be generalized to the general populace. After all, prisoners are already in prison and have had a chance to acclimatize themselves to the conditions to some extent. It might support an argument for the death penalty limited to persons already in prison who commit murder; but then, the threat of confinement in a much more restrictive facility (say, in one of the modern "supermax" prisons) might also accomplish this goal.