Make all murders committed on Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays punishable by Death, and all the other days murder is punishable by Life Imprisonment.
I realize that some will argue that this makes a mockery of the system, and they are probably right. But I think it’d be worth a try just to see what happens. Would a significant number of potential murderers, who get the urge to kill on a capitol punishment day postpone their plans until a non-capitol punishment day of the week just to escape from the gurney?
That would be an interesting experiment but unfortunately could never happen. The Supreme Court ruled long ago that mandatory death penalties were unconstitutional. There would be no guarantee that everyone who committed a murder on a weekend would be sentenced to death.
But were we to try this, yeah, I think it would deter some people. Not the serial killer or someone who just walked in on their spouse with someone else in bed, but I think the “I hate my ex wife/ex husband and s/he must die” types probably would wait till Monday.
An interesting idea, but it’s really not necessary. In effect, we’ve already performed the experiment. We have some states that have the death penalty, and others that don’t. Are their murder rates different? We also have states that used to have the death penalty, then didn’t (when SCOTUS struck down their statutes for constitutional reasons), then reinstated the death penalty (by correcting the deficiencies in their statutes). Did the murder rate go up, then down again?
In both cases, I believe the answer is “no.” I don’t think anyone has ever demonstrated a statistically significant correlation between the presence or absence of capital punishment and the murder rate.
It’s not hard to understand why capital punishment doesn’t seem to have a deterrent effect. You or I might be deterred by the existence of such punishment, but then again, we wouldn’t commit those kinds of heinous crimes in the first place, regardless of the potential punishment. The kinds of people who commit the kinds of crimes that can result in the death penalty are generally not the types of people who make any sort of rational calculation before doing the deed.
And even if they do, they often start out, as do most criminals, with the assumption that they won’t get caught (think of John Muhammed’s DC Sniper notes in which he said, “I am God.”). If you figure the law is never going to get to you, the nature of the punishment becomes irrelevant to you.
The death penalty is about revenge and politics… not about justice or reducing crime. The public feels “safer” and the politicians play “tough” on crime.
As long as their “toughness” actually does something to reduce the incidence of crime, OK. The point here is that it’s never been shown that having the death penalty has any effect on the crime rate. It’s “toughness” that doesn’t produce any positive result. There’s no deterrence, it ends up costing the taxpayers more than life in prison, and it’s no more effective at removing the offender from society than life in prison.
If all that weren’t enough, if an innocent person gets convicted (and that seems to be more than just a one-in-a-million freak occurrence), there’s no way to undo the injustice.
Rashak Mani is right - it’s only justifiable if you believe that revenge is a proper motive, or if you’re trying to improve your election chances. Neither one of those is good enough for me.
Another flaw is that I might be going to premeditatedly commit a murder whatever the penalty is, but still be able to choose to do it on thursday if that’s a lesser penalty.
I don’t think anyone has ever demonstrated a statistically significant correlation between the presence or absence of capital punishment and the murder rate.
Considering we have 1 person sentenced to death for every 1,600 murders, that’s an unfair statement. Especially since only a very small percentage of those that DO get sentenced to death ever actually see a needle.
Getting sentenced to death doesn’t actually mean you will be put to death anymore. If we executed 100% of people on death row (after they exhausted their appeals), maybe would-be criminals would begin to understand that we mean business. Nobody is deterred by the death penalty as it is because we don’t use it enough. If a death sentence actually MEANT that yes, you’re gonna die, maybe we would see some deterrence.
If, say, a diabetic only took 1 of their insulin shots per week (when they need 3 shots a day), would you blame the insulin when they eventually went into a coma and died? Or would you blame their lack of doing what was needed to stay alive?
Blalron: Simple, and uncostitutional (as well it should be). I agree with the posters who’ve said we already have lots of experimentation: state vs state, and the time period when the death penalty was not in place on a national level. From what I’ve seen, I’m unconviced it works as a deterent.
Good point, although I don’t need any evidence of the deterence in order to want to keep prison sentences in place, as they serve the purpose of removing murders from society.
So what? Killing shoplifters would remove them from society, too. I’m not rabidly anti-death penalty, but I think you need a really, really good reason to support it, and a fool-proof method of making sure it isn’t applied in error. So far, I haven’t seen either.
The trouble with statistical studies of sentencing is two-fold:
Firstly, crime rates are heavily dependant on economic factors, so with long range or wide area studies it’s almost impossible to isolate sentencing as a factor. Secondly, what matters with deterence is not actual sentences, but public perception, so public debate has more impact than actual changes in sentence.
That said, there are several factors which do appear to have some influence: Severity, Certainty, and Immediacy. The death sentence is severe, but we’ve never seen it applied with certainty or immediacy, so it lacks a lot of its potential power.
The idea of the OP is to eliminate geographic and long-term factors in a study. The trouble is that measuring a slight correlation isn’t enough. You’d need to be able to show a causal link between the sentence and people’s change in behaviour. I’d expect that you’d end up with another “inconclusive” study, which the anti-death-penalty crowd would claim as a win.
[For the record, I’m opposed to revenge as a factor in sentencing, and I don’t believe sentencing has much effect as a deterent. Hence I’m anti-death penalty, and not much in favour of long prison sentences either].