Report

Amnesty International

Deterrence is an argument often cited to justify the death penalty. On the surface, the argument makes sense. Rational people understand links between cause and effect and crime and punishment. A fear of death or the possibility of death also affects the behavior of most reasonable people.

People who murder, however, are rarely rational at the time they commit the crime. The threat of execution at some future date does not enter the minds of killers acting under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol, in the grip of fear or rage, panicking while committing another crime, or simply lacking an understanding of the gravity of their crime. Hired killers obviously assume they will not be apprehended.

The death penalty never has shown to benefit a society. In fact, there are strong indications that it increases people's tolerance of and tendency toward violence.

No credible study yet has produced any solid scientific evidence that the death penalty deters violent crime. According to FBI statistics, the murder rate in some states which use the death penalty is twice that of some states which do not use the death penalty. Even researchers who set out to prove that police officers have greater protection in jurisdictions permitting executions uncovered no deterrent value in the death penalty. Between 1976 and 1985, almost twice as many law enforcement officers were killed in death penalty states as were killed in states that do not execute.

The widely respected Thorsten Sellin studies, conducted in the United States during 1962, 1967 and 1980, concluded that the death penalty has no deterrent effect. The British Royal Commission on Capital Punishment analyzed statistics from seven European and three non-European countries, reporting that no evidence linked abolition of the death penalty to increased homicide rates. A Department of Public Law study conducted in Nigeria concluded that "no efficacy can be shown for the operation of the death penalty" in cases of either murder or armed robbery.

The 1988 Report to the United Nations Committee on Crime Prevention and Control, a detailed international study, found that all its documented research "has failed to provide scientific proof that executions have a greater deterrent effect than life imprisonment. Such proof is unlikely to be forthcoming. The evidence as a whole still gives no support to the deterrent hypothesis."

Some researchers have found that the death penalty not only fails to reduce murder rates, but also may increase the number of homicides. The U.S. Bowers-Pierce study, analyzing executions between 1907 and 1963, concluded that an average of two additional homicides were committed in the month after an execution took place. The researchers, like many who have analyzed facts compiled before and after them, noted a "brutalizing" effect on society resulting from executions.