Misapplications Reviews: The Capital Punishment Controversy: Part I

Few questions in the social sciences have spawned so much empirical research as whether capital punishment can deter murders. An odd collection of inquirers that includes sociologists, lawyers, economists, psychologists, statisticians, and philosophers have examined data that cross the boundaries between nations and centuries; their methods of analysis have ranged from the techniques of multivariate statistics to the recitation of juicy anecdotes. Professor Ernest Van den Haag (1) was not abusing reality when he characterized capital punishment research as a “cottage industry.”The conclusions of the studies have been almost as diverse as their methods and data sources. While a majority have discerned no significant association between execution and homicide levels, several have supported the hypothesis of strong deterrent effects. Some have argued that executions postpone some killings but do not avert them, while others claim to have shown that capital sanctions actually stimulate homicides. (This last finding could make sense if, because of the death penalty, those who kill deem it urgent also to kill witnesses and to resist police capture with gunfire.) An unsurprising result of this cacophony is that partisans of all positions in the capital punishment controversy can cite scholarly investigations to buttress their viewpoints.