by Frances Taylor

Created on: July 21, 2008

The death penalty is not an effective deterrent to crime. People who commit crimes do have concerns about getting caught, but once the decision is made to go forward, it is probably because they have decided in their own minds that they will not be caught. This could be as true for petty thievery as for the most heinous acts of murder.

Statistics have shown that more than 90 percent of people who commit bank robberies are caught. In other words, its a crime that very few people ever get away with. Yet bank robberies continue year after year. Someone always does it for the first time, believing that they will be the one person who gets away with it, despite the failures of everyone else. And of course, they get caught. Television interviews with prisoners in jail for various crimes usually reveal that person gave some thought, but not much, to the fact that they might get catch, particularly if they had committed the crime in the past and gotten away with it.

Some countries have very stringent punishments for relatively minor crimes - cutting of a person's hand for stealing, for example. And even in such a harsh environment, with punishment all but assured, people in that society still steal. It's also worth noting that countries without the death penalty have a lower overall crime rate than those that do. Is it because they have less need for the death penalty because people who live there are somehow better than people in other countries, or is it because less state-sponsored violence helps lessen violence overall?

In a famous murder case, a man killed his pregnant wife, dumped her body in a lake and claimed to everyone that he had been fishing while his wife was out doing last minute Christmas shopping and never returned home. Months later the body of his wife and their unborn child wash up on the shore of the very lake the man claimed to have been fishing in. The man, Scott Petersen, was a suspect from the start and is now on death row. For reasons that none of us will ever truly know, Petersen clearly believed that he was going to get away with the murder of his wife and child. The fact that California has a death penalty and uses it frequently did not deter him either.

Perhaps it is just human nature to believe bad things always happen to the other guy, and perhaps that also includes the death penalty. The death penalty is not a deterrent to crime, its a reaction to it.

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