US scores fourth place in global ranking!

Interesting. Of course, for a fair comparison, we would need numbers about how many murders capital punishment deters in the United States, and how many it deters in China, Iran, Vietnam, and the other countries in the "top ten". As far as I know, such numbers are inconclusive for the US, and non-existent for the other nine countries.

Or about whether it does deter murders, period.

I don't think it's possible to "proove" that capital punishment deters murders, Thomas. You can only speculate.

I'm thinking about the 23 executed in Texas alone & wondering why.

Most murders, MOST not all, are crimes of passion and not premeditated.

You cannot deter a crime of passion. It's a crime of passion. hence the name.

Numbers about whether it does deter murders? Not very likely to be found anywhere...

Of course, we could compare the numbers of murders in countries with death penalty to numbers in countries without death penalty...

Criminals don't believe they'll be caught, anyway.

Punishments aren't deterrents, they're bargaining chips in making people confess.

Two years ago, the last time I got into this discussion in serious, my opponent and I looked at the scholarly, peer reviewed studies we could find in the statistical literature. As best we could tell, it turned out that within the legal framework of the US, it's clear capital punishment does deter killing. What isn't clear is whether it deters more killings than the number of convicts it executes. That online community isn't alive anymore, but I could try and dig out some dusty links if you're interested in that discussion. But for the purpose of your "top ten", I think it's pertinent that China, Iran, and friends kill peope basically without due process of law, so their capital punishment probably doesn't even deter anything. (I'm pretty confident of this even though I've never found empirical evidence to back it up.)

If punishment worked, there would be no crime by now.

Still, the US of A rank 4.

But, Thomas, it'd be actually quite interesting. I don't doubt that the death penalty could deter some murders. But would it deter more murders than a life sentence, for example? How do other countries fare, where there is no death penalty?

I think we could do better. Probably not No. 1, but we should certainly be able to get to No. 2!

it's worthwhile to distingiush between 2 concepts here. both capital punishment & life wihout parole incapacitate, ie. prevent repeat offenses. but to deter, the punishment has to prevent the original offense.

fwiw, capital punushment doesn't deter any more than life without parole, imo.

I doubt it's a matter of punishment working, Bella. It is more a matter of the uncertainty of punishment, in my opinion.

It would be interesting to find out just what constitutes a capital crime in the various countries leading the list. We tend to assume it is limited to murder, but China may include bribary of public officials, for all I know.

Dont get that bit of logic. If, as you say, the death penalty does deter murderers, then it would not be the due process of law that would deter the murderer, but the prospect of death, no? (One could even say that the death penalty is generally defended as a necessity because due process of law does not in itself deter enough - a necessary bit of primitivity to still include, so to say.)

Basically, if death at the end of an intricate process of law serves as deterrence, wouldn't death at the end of a no-nonsense, no-niceties summary process, Chinese-style, do so even more?

On the same count, in China the death sentence is handed out even for non-violent crimes, such as fraud. There is a legal process of sorts, and it's not just that it is it of low quality - it's also that the threshhold for handing out a death sentence is simply much lower. And if one does assert that the prospect of death deters crime, wouldnt an increased prospect of death deter even more?

Basically, your assertion that the US is more humane or just than the other countries because it has a due process of law is one thing (though the number of people who were nevertheless sentenced to death even though they turned out to be innocent shows that's hardly the end of the argument). But that it would for the same reason be more effective in deterring murder (more than the same due process of law without death penalty) while the no-nonsense Chinese death sentences won't "even deter anything" - I don't see how that follows. If one accepts that the prospect of death deters crime, than the larger the chance to get the death sentence, the more crime is deterred, no? (I've heard street crime was quite low in Saddam's Iraq ...)

As for whether "within the legal framework of the US, it's clear capital punishment does deter killing", I'm wondering whether homocide occurs significantly less in Texas, where almost half of the executions took place, than in other states, for one.

In all seriousness Thomas I would like to see the material on the death penalty as deterrent. Now I'm not being a smart-arse. I would envisage that good research could in fact throw some light on what appears to be, at first blush, a total conundrum. I'm thinking for example of interviews of convicted murderers who are on death row as well as those who have been either sentenced to imprisonment or had their death sentences commuted. Questions could be asked to get information out of them, an ethnomethodological or phenomenological approach might yield some data.

I know it sounds ridiculous to argue that it's possible to measure the effect of a deterrent because it seems that you really have to measure that which didn't take place and that is a conundrum. I'm going to hypothesise here and say that most convicted murderers would say that they didn't think of the penalty they might face. Tied in with that is the point already made that most criminals don't think they'll be caught. And I reckon that makes sense. I have never met a criminal who thought they'd be caught, in fact they were pretty surprised when they were caught (memo to self, research the hypothesis that only incompetent criminals get caught).

Now levity aside, I think it's true (needs to be tested, just guessing) that most criminals do in fact believe they wouldn't get caught and don't even think of penalty. This being so then punishment of itself isn't a deterrent. However the fear of apprehension plus the chance of punishment and the quantum of punishment might, just might, be deterrent factors.

Also although we can interview murderers we can't identify an interview those who thought "uh-oh I could swing/be gassed/be poisoned/be fried/be shot for this, I'd better not do it." So that sort of knocks a hole in the proposed research plan. But perhaps that can be overcome somehow. Anyway it should be considered.

But again an interesting point and if you can find that info it would be good to read - again I stress this is not a pouty challenge, if you can't dig it up no problems, it was good to read that view.

Interestingly, Texas had 6.4 murders per 100,000 in 2003.

Michigan had 6.1 and Alaska had 6.0. Neither of these states have the death penalty.

In order for the death penalty to deter murder, potential murderers must expect there to be some correlation between murdering people and being sentenced to death. My assumption, which I am unable to prove is that this correlation is weak in China and Iran, where punishment is more or less arbitrary, and much stronger (though still imperfect) in America, which has a reasonably functional court system.


The line of research I was thinking of started with Isaac Ehrlich: The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: A Matter of Life and Death, American Economic Review, (June 1975). Before it, several sociologists and criminologists, none of them statisticians, had published evidence of the kind Intrepid just posted. They compared the murder rates in states that didn't have capital punishment with the murder rates in states that did. They observed that the states without capital punishment had lower murder rates than those who did. (In March(?) 2001, Scientific American reported a similar comparison, based on up-to-date numbers, which suggested the same result.) Anyway, that was stage one of the debate.

The two major problems with stage one analysis are (1) it does not control for other factors that might influence the rates of murder, manslaughter, etc. (2) even if it did control for that, it only establishes correlation, not causation. When states without capital punishment have lower murder rates, does that mean capital punishment encourages murder, or does it mean that they didn't think they need capital punishment at their murder rate, so didn't have it? In stage two of the debate, Isaac Ehrlich fixed problem (1) by collecting data on the "other" influences and running multiple regressions on them. He also fixed problem (2) by running time series, and looked whether changes in the murder rate tended to follow changes in legislation, or vice versa. After these corrections, he found that for every convict executed under American law from 1930 - 1970, 6-9 murders were deterred.

Since 1975, many similar studies have been conducted, some collecting new data, some re-analyzing Ehrlich's data. Some studies say they confirmed Ehrlich, some say they contradicted him. But the last time I went to the library about this (as I said, about 2 years ago), the preponderance of the literature suggested a deterrent effect. But the spread of results was too big to refute the hypothesis that capital punishment in America is a net killer, not a net saver of people.

one more qualification to keep in mind is that not all murders are capital offenses. i'm no expert, but i imagine that second-degree murder and manslaughter wouldn't call for a death sentence without a lot of aggravating factors, so it would surprise me if capital punishment lowered the incidence of all criminal killings, as opposed to the premeditated ones.

Good point. You can't expect a punishment to deter acts it doesn't punish. My "murder, manslaughter, etc." was an extrapolation that was indefensible. Ehrlich explicitly examined the effect of capital punishment on murder only.