by Jerome Carter

Created on: October 29, 2010

Statistics have shown that the death penalty is not an effective crime deterrent.  In fact, death penalty laws typically have no effect on crime rates at all.  These laws may be politically expedient but they generally serve no practical purpose.  When jurisdictions implement or remove the death penalty, there is no significant change in crime rates.  Crime neither increases nor decreases in response to the implementation or suspension of capital punishment statutes.

For the sake of simplicity, people who commit serious, capital, crimes, such as murder, can be divided into two general categories.  The first category would be people who committed a serious crime on the spur of the moment.  For example a group of armed robbers who shoot a victim, who had produced a firearm, and tried to shoot his assailants.  In that scenario, the armed robbers did not plan to kill the victim but responded at the spur of the moment.  They did not foresee that they would be involved in a murder case when they planned their criminal activity.  So even if they knew about the death penalty they would not have taken it into account.

The second category would be people who deliberately plan serious criminal activities such as murder.  They likely plan to avoid being caught, so the death penalty as little deterrent effect on them either.  In both cases the capital punishment will have little or no deterrent effect on these people’s propensity to commit serious crimes.

One way to gauge the effectiveness of the death penalty is to compare the homicide rates of countries with capital punishment to those without the death penalty.  Some countries with capital punishment have very high homicide rates, while others have lower rates.  Some countries without the death penalty have high rates while others without capital punishment have low homicide rates.  In other words there is little correlation between homicide rates and death penalty statutes.

In the United States, a federal ruling resulted in a moratorium on capital punishment from 1972 to 1976.  During this time homicide rates increased.  When capital punishment was reinstated, national homicide rates did decrease, but only temporarily.  Two or three years after the restoration of the death penalty, American homicide rates reached their highest levels in recorded history.  These statistics demonstrate that capital punishment has little value

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