Deterrence and the Death Penalty (2012) / Chapter Skim
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1 Introduction
1 Introduction
Pages 9-14
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From page 9... ...
Then, in Gregg, it had ruled that the death penalty is not, in all circumstances, cruel and unusual punishment, thereby opening the way for states to revise their capital punishment statutes to conform to the requirements of Gregg. In the immediate aftermath of Gregg, a National Research Council report reviewed the evidence relating to the deterrent effect of the death penalty that had been published through the mid-1970s.
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From page 10... ...
794) reanalyzed several of the data sets used by the authors who claimed to have found robust deterrent effects and concluded that: We find that the existing evidence for deterrence is surprisingly fragile, and even small changes in specifications yield dramatically different re
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From page 11... ...
criticisms of Zimmerman's original work do not hold up under scrutiny, and other authors have also rebutted D&W's criticisms of their research. Beyond disagreement about whether the research evidence shows a deterrent effect of capital punishment, some researchers claim to have found a brutalization effect from state-sanctioned executions such that capital punishment actually increases homicide rates (see, e.g., Cochran and Chamlin, 2000; Thomson, 1999)
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From page 12... ...
Not all supporters of capital punishment base their argument on deterrent effects, and not all opponents would be affected by persuasive evidence of such effects. The case for capital punishment is sometimes based on normative retributive arguments that the death penalty is the only appropriate and proportional response to especially heinous crimes; the case against it is sometimes based on
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From page 13... ...
In including recommendations for future research, the study's statement of task recognized that potential remedies to shortcomings in the evidence on the deterrent effect of capital punishment on homicide might also be used in the study of the crime prevention effects of noncapital sanctions. Thus, this report also offers recommendations for improving the scientific quality and policy relevance of that research.
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From page 14... ...
Chapter 3 provides an overview of the possible mechanisms by which the legal status and practice of execution might affect homicide rates and also provides a nontechnical primer on some of the key challenges to making valid inferences about the deterrent effect of the death penalty. Chapters 4 and 5 review and assess the panel and time-series studies, respectively.
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