Deterrence and the Death Penalty (2012) / Chapter Skim
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reviewed the evidence relating to the deterrent effect of the death penalty that had been gathered through the mid-1970s. That review was highly critical of the earlier research and concluded (National Research Council, 1978, p.
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However, even these studies suffer from two intrinsic shortcomings that severely limit what can be learned from them about the effect of the death penalty -- as it has actually been administered in the United States in the past 35 years -- on the death penalty. Properly understood, the relevant question about the deterrent effect of capital punishment is the differential or marginal deterrent effect of execution over the deterrent effect of other available or commonly used penalties, specifically, a lengthy prison sentence or one of life without the possibility of
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Commentary on research findings often pits studies claiming to find statistically significant deterrent effects against those finding no statistically significant effects, with the latter studies sometimes interpreted as implying that there is no deterrent effect. A fundamental point of logic about hypothesis testing is that failure to reject a null hypothesis does not imply that the null hypothesis is correct.
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As noted above, research on the effect of capital punishment on homicide suffers from two fundamental flaws that make them uninformative about the effect of capital punishment on homicide rates: they do not specify the noncapital sanction components of the sanction regime for the punishment of homicide, and they use incomplete or implausible models of potential murderers' perceptions of and response to the capital punishment component of a sanction regime. In addition, the existing studies use strong and unverifiable assumptions to identify the effects of capital punishment on homicides.
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Thus, any effect that these noncapital sanctions have on the homicide rate may contaminate any estimated effect of capital punishment. Potential Murderers' Perceptions of and Responses to Capital Punishment A by-product of the absence of consideration of the noncapital component of the sanction regime is that no studies consider how the capital and noncapital components of a regime combine in affecting the behavior of potential murderers.
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Because of this basic flaw in the research, the committee has no basis for assessing whether the findings of time-series studies reflect a real effect of executions on homicides or are artifacts of models that incorrectly specify how deviations from a trend line cause potential murderers to update their forecasts of the future course of executions. Strong and Unverifiable Assumptions To obtain a single estimate that specifies the effect of capital punishment on homicide, researchers invariably rely on a range of strong and unverified assumptions.
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can ever be subjected to the kind of statistical analysis that would validly establish the presence or absence of a deterrent effect" (National Research Council, 1978, p.
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Thus, even if the research agenda we outline is not ultimately successful in illuminating some aspects of the effect of capital punishment on homicide, advancing knowledge on the crime prevention effects of noncapital sanctions and their enforcement can make major contributions to important policy issues. REFERENCE National Research Council.
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