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According to some death penalty supporters, killing prisoners is the only way to ensure that they will never again commit a crime. Execution certainly incapacitates a person forever. A state policy of executing prisoners, however, reflects several false assumptions.

First, a state must either execute every prisoner who might later commit a killing or claim the ability to determine accurately which prisoners will and which prisoners will not commit crimes in the future. The former option would result in killings too numerous for civilized society to tolerate. The latter option indicates judicial omniscience which defies both reason and experience.

Secondly, the incapacitation-by-death argument assumes that no other effective means of preventing crimes can be found. It assumes that law enforcement, judicial, and penal systems are incapable of protecting society without recourse to killing. Executions deliver to citizens the cynical message that effective incarceration or rehabilitation are beyond the scope of modern society.

Finally, the incapacitation argument maintains that the likelihood of wrong executions will be outweighed by a sufficiently lower crime rate. No solid statistical evidence supports such a proposition. Judicial errors have resulted in the execution of numerous innocent people. The number of executed prisoners who would have committed no further crimes cannot, of course, be determined. Incarceration, however, has a great advantage over the death penalty insofar as errors inevitably resulting from fallible judicial systems can be corrected.

The death penalty may actually encourage murder because of its brutalizing effect.

Studies by Thorsten Sellin on criminal recidivism in the United States corroborate the findings of researchers who focused on six European countries. Professor Sellin found that less than one-third of 1 percent -- .31 percent -- of the paroled murderers in the United States were subsequently convicted of homicide. A much larger percentage of prisoners who had served sentences for non-capital crimes committed murder after their release.

Therefore, the logic of homicide prevention through execution would require the killing of not only convicted murderers, but also people convicted of burglary, armed robbery, and fraud. Hundreds of executions would be necessary to increase the likelihood of preventing one murder. Moreover, the probability of several wrongful convictions among those hundreds would be high.

As a prominent criminologist pointed out, people judged to be violently insane are removed from society by institutionalization: "Surely if we have found incarceration to be an effective means of incapacitating insane killers, we can live with it as a means of incapacitating the 'normal' ones."

Amnesty USA