UPDATE: Economists Provide a Unique View on Capital Punishment Debate

By Andrew Benfield
Impunity Watch Reporter, North America

WASHINGTON, D.C. – In 1976 the Supreme Court used studies on the deterrent effect of capital punishment to reinstitute the death penalty.  Recently, economists have revisited the deterrent effect of capital punishment through an economic prospective.  Nearly a dozen studies have been conducted in which the rate of murders in a specified areas are compared with the number of executions within the same time period and area location.  The studies suggest that for each execution three to eighteen murders are prevented. 

More specifically, the studies examine a particular area’s murder rate over time.  The study then tracks the execution rate for the specified area over the same period of time in order to elicit the affect that executions have on the murder rate of that year or the following years.  In order to strictly compare the two rates, economists attempt to eliminate the influence of broad social trends such as “the general crime rate, effectiveness of the criminal justice system, economic conditions and demographic changes.”

The empirical data derived from these studies has convinced some legal scholars that capital punishment has a strong deterrent affect.  In a Stanford Law Review article, two legal professors concluded that “capital punishment may well save lives…Those who object to capital punishment must come to terms with the possibility that the failure to inflict capital punishment will fail to protect life.” 

However, the new economic studies have been met with sharp criticism.  Gary Becker, winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in economics states that there is not enough variation in the studies’ evidence to be confident that they have “isolated a deterrent effect.”

A greater criticism is that the studies are working on the implied assumption that criminals are working as rational actors when committing crimes.  For capital punishment to work as a deterrent, a criminal must weigh the advantage of committing the act against the cost the criminal may face if caught.  The economic studies may give too much weight to the “rational criminal” element. 

Finally, some legal scholars criticize capital punishment on purely fiscal grounds.  It has been estimated that a single capital litigation can cost nearly $1 million.  Critics argue that this money could be better spent on crime prevention that would prevent more murders that the deterrent effect of carrying out the capital punishment. 

These issues loom over the Supreme Court as the prepare to hear a challenge to capital punishment procedure in early 2008.  Noticeably absent from the economic studies is the moral implications of an innocent person put to death. 

For more information, please see:

The New York Times – Does death penalty Save Lives? A New Debate – 18 November 2007

Impunity Watch – Supreme Court to Hear Case on the Constitutionality of Lethal Injection – 25 September 2007