Sure that would be a possibility if he was simply making the argument that high murder rates existed alongside high rates of execution.
But if you read his summaries of the studies, you’ll see that in each case, murder rates increased after the death penalty was brought in. This suggests, at the very least, that if there is any causation here, it is “executions leads to more murders.”
Admittedly, Potter does not present any conclusive finding about causation. His main point is correlation, about which only tentative conclulsions can be drawn, IMO.
Still, in general, if enough studies show the same correlation, there are certain inferences that can be drawn from that. And, specifically, if enough studies show that states that introduce the death penalty suffer an increase in the specific types of crime that the DP is supposed to prevent, then that presents us with some hard choices about what the death penalty can and cannot accomplish.
I think the abolishment of the death penalty is a sign that a country has a greater overall respect for life, thus contributing towards an atmosphere of nonviolence.
The death penalty is a sign that a state or country has a great degree of negative qualities like hatred and revenge. Making it a climate more favorable towards creating murderers.
Well, for the 115 people who have been exonerated and released from death row since 1973, go here.
For a description of the circumstances surrounding each individual exoneration (i.e., why the people on death row were finally found to be not guilty), check out this page. The most recent exoneration was less than a month ago:
This page has all the historical statistics about executions in the United States since the founding of Jamestown at the beginning of the 17th century.
The figure of 927 is for executions since 1976, and can be found here.
OK. Yes, I will agree. Reluctantly, and with no small degree of anguish, but yes.
And I will say again ,as I said on the first page, that my posistion is an emotional one. I cannot, for the moment, divorce my sense of outrage from my sense of what is what is right. I cannot, for the moment, shake the feeling that murderers are getting off easy. It sticks in my craw and I don’t what to do with it.
You see what happens, spooje, when you let yourself get bogged down in statistics? You and I both came into this thread to express the opinion that murderers don’t deserve to live and to express the reasons why we feel that way.
I know you are trying to be reasonable and rational and all the other good stuff, but you’ve been waylayed by one aspect of the question, and an aspect that has nothing to do with what you feel is right.
We have every right to believe that murderers don’t deserve to live…and our opponents have every right to believe otherwise. Neither of us is unequivocally right or wrong. Right and wrong is a human construct, and what is right or wrong basically boils down to what society accepts as being right or wrong.
In our country, we long held the belief that murderers should forfeit their lives if they choose to deprive someone else of the wonderful things life has to offer. We believed that a person shouldn’t be allowed to continue to breath when he has made the purposeful decision to take that away from someone else.
Then for awhile, liberal influence reigned. The death penalty was outlawed. Death sentences were commuted to life sentences. Murderers formerly on death row began to be parolled. Some committed more murders. Murderers began to be sentenced to life, and then parolled after as little as 16 years. Attempts were made to understand murders and to “rehabilitate” them. Never mind that the life of the person they killed couldn’t be rehabilitated, the powers that be decided it would be wonderful if they could be “rehabilitated” and returned to society as a “contributing” member, despite the fact that society already had plenty of contributing members and didn’t want for anything as a result of the murderer’s absence.
This permissive attitude prevailed all through the justice system to the point that people were routinely being robbed, beaten, raped and/or killed by people who had been sent to prison numerous times and parolled over and over again. So society got fed up. Minimum sentencing guidelines were established to thwart liberal judges who tended to go easy on criminals. Three strikes laws were established to thwart judges and parole boards who kept releasing criminals over and over and over. And the death penalty was reinstated – although with a method of execution similar to putting a beloved family pet to sleep – but it was reinstated nevertheless.
Certainly, we need to take every precaution to ensure that innocent people are not executed. But I would wager that the vast majority of the death penalty opponents who cite this as their reasoning in wanting to abolish it would still want it abolished even if it could be proved with 100% accuracy that no innocent person was ever being executed.
So, since right and wrong is largely a matter of opinion based on what society says it is, we are in the position of living in a society that – after trying the liberal approach and seeing the results it produces – has determined that it is right that murderers should indeed be put to death for their crimes. And as long as that’s the case, you and I can continue to feel that the right thing has been done when a person who has made the deliberate decision to rob another of the joys of life has had to forfeit his in return.
But Starving Artist, do you really not see that basing your actions (especially wide, sweeping, community-scale actions like these) on irrational emotions leads to results that both you and I agree are bad? Don’t you agree that we want crime rates to go down rather than up? Don’t you agree that the statistics seem to indicate that the death penalty works in the wrong direction?
I know you’re full of thoughts of “rights” and “deserve” and “justice” and “vengeance”, but sit back and think. What serves humanity best, in the real world? Is it the satisfaction of arbitrary and abstract values, or low crime rates? Which would you rather have?
This would be so much more moving if you could show that the scary scenario you describe actually took place. So far, the only “results” we’ve seen are thought experiments and counterfactual assertions.
Priceguy, there is not a doubt in my mind that you are a very good person. And I know it must be hard for you to run into someone who thinks like I do. But no, I wouldn’t say that I agree that statistics indicate that the death penalty works in the wrong direction. I know many of the people here think they’ve found evidence that says it does, but I don’t believe it. Why? Because there are way too many variables that enter into it. From time to time and from state to state, there are countless influences that come into play, and I don’t believe that any statistical research exists that accurately measures the effect of all these influences on the question of the death penalty, either pro or con.
And then we have the question of what serves “humanity” best. I don’t believe that the crime rate is the only measure, although certainly it’s a key one and very important. But I also believe that humanity benefits from knowing that justice will be done if a crime is committed. I think humanity benefits by not having to live with the feeling that people can commit heinous crimes against innocent people and, after a certain period of rehabilitation, be allowed back into society and sent along their merry way. I think humanity benefits from knowing that the family members and loved ones of the victims of heinous and/or murderous crimes do not have to continue to suffer their grief and sorrow while knowing that the person who caused it has done his time, been deemed “rehabilitated” and released from custody to get a job, get married, start a family or go back to the one he had, and continue on with his life pretty as though nothing had happened.
I know you don’t agree with this, and I’m not trying to persuade you to my point of view…but you asked what I thought.
I wonder: do you know anyone who’s been imprisoned? In particular, have you known them long enough to know whether they really came out and continued their lives where they left off “as though nothing had happened”?
You must be pretty young. The “scary scenario” I described was both commonplace and common knowledge in this country from the late sixties/early seventies up to approximately the mid-nineties when harsher penalties against criminals began to be enacted.
Of course not. We can only do as much as we can. But everything we know, everything, points to higher crime rates under the death penalty. We don’t know that the Earth is round either, but everything we know points to it, so we assume that it is round and work from that theory. Why shouldn’t we do the same with the death penalty?
More importantly, read mhendo’s big post.
You have all this evidence against you, but you don’t believe it. Why not? What was wrong with every single one of these studies? What is your interpretation of these statistics? Isn’t it time to sharpen Occam’s Razor and realize that these statistics mean exactly what they seem to mean?
To me, this sounds like the ultimate solution. One more productive member of society, one more happy life. Instead of the guy who killed somebody, we know have a steady family man.
Well, let me answer with a question of my own. Have you ever known anyone who had a family member raped or tortured or murdered (or maybe all three) and been around to see what their lives are like, and how they would feel if the person who did it was free and going about his business “as though it had never happened”? (And when I refer to it being as though “nothing had happened,” I mean he is free to go where he wants to go, and do what he wants to do, and go freely through the remainder of his life…just as he would have had he not committed the murder.)
Let me answer that with a question of my own. Do you have any evidence that grieving family members of a person whose murderer is executed feel significantly better than grieving family members of a person whose murderer isn’t executed?
Yep. Just happily going through life, serving as a perfect example to all and sundry that you can rape, torture and kill – not to mention completely ruin the lives of the family members and loved ones of the person you raped, tortured and killed – and hey…just do a little time, get rehabilitated and you’ll be out mowing your lawn and taking the kiddies to Burger King before you know it.
Come on, man…get real. The world isn’t wired in such a way that happily returning a murderer to society as a steady family man is going to be a productive way to combat crime. It defies human nature.
I remember when I was a kid and I went through a period of time when I was unhappy that the world wasn’t happy and wholesome and fun like it was in movies and on television. But I grew up and found out that the world just doesn’t work that way. Sure, it’d be great if everyone both could and would react the way you envision in this scenario you imagine, but it is no more realistic than to expect that life will be like some happy, romantic comedy.
Sure, you see them on t.v. all the time. You see them at trial when the death penalty is assessed. They talk about how now justice has been done and they can begin to try to put their tragedy behind them. How it will give them closure. Sometimes they’ll say things like now their loved one can rest in peace, etc.
And they frequently attend the execution of the murderer. They want to be there, even if it’s a long way away and 18 years after the murder, to see the person who deprived their loved one of his or her life and created so much misery pay with his life for his crime
I don’t know what point you’re going after here. I know dozens of people who have been imprisoned. Literally. Almost all on drug charges or drug related offenses. (they are now in recovery, that’s how I know them) Some of them have done significant stretches inside. Since they were all in the horror of active addiction before going in and were introduced to recovery programs inside or after their release (most after their release), their lives are considerably better * now.
To be sure, prison is a horrific place (one where I would last maybe 5 minutes, six, tops). But I would assume, assume*, that this because of those folks who are there because they are violent thugs.
The fact that it sticks in your craw, and the fact that you find it hard to discount your emotion and your “sense of what is right,” are both perfectly natural reactions. It’s very hard for any of us to discount our visceral reactions to situations like this. I might not share your sense of what is right regarding execution, but i understand that my feeling on the subject, and your feeling on the subject, have less to do with statistics and scholarly studies than with unquantifiable, very personal feelings.
The difference between you and Starving Artist is that you are able to draw the distinction between fundamentally emotional or moral positions on the one hand, and rational and evidence-based conclusions on the other. You don’t say that statistics and evidence are unimportant to the way you feel, and then try to slip in your own statistics and evidence that have no basis in fact.
Starving Artist pretends that he respects this distinction, but then proceeds to argue, based on nothing but some generalized notion of “common sense” and his own “feelings,” that all the statistics and all the evidence and all the scholarly studies in the world are wrong. He keeps slagging off the “liberal approach” and “the results it produces,” while ignoring every piece of evidence that suggests that “the results it produces” are not the fairy stories that he has conjured up in his head.
Starving Artist concludes that “And as long as that’s the case, you and I can continue to feel that the right thing has been done when a person who has made the deliberate decision to rob another of the joys of life has had to forfeit his in return.” This is itself is not problematic. As i’ve said numerous times, i understand that some people have a fundamental feeling that the death penalty is an appropriate punishment for certain crimes, even if i don’t agree with them. What i cannot respect is that Starving Artist continues to contend that every single evidence-based study into the empirical effects of the death penalty is wrong, and that the facts are represented by his opinion alone.
Here’s the fundamental difference: if i have interpreted his post correctly, spooje has said, in effect:
Yes, i concede that the death penalty probably doesn’t improve our safety, and that it costs us more, and that it provides little or no deterrent to violent crime. And i concede that too many innocent people end up on death row. Despite all this, however, i still believe at a fundamental moral level that execution is the appropriate punishment for certain criminals, and that murderers who get nothing more than jail time are getting off easy.
If Starving Artist had the moral fibre to make a similar statement, then i might not agree with his desire for the death penalty, but at least i could respect that our differences were based on unquantifiable moral issues. But while he keeps pretending that evidence doesn’t matter, and at the same time throwing out fabricated and anecdotal “evidence” as if it does matter, i’m not sure if the right word to describe his position is “hypocrisy” or “cognitive dissonance.”