Live by the Study, Die by the Study
Posted by Shannon Love on May 15th, 2008 (All posts by Shannon Love)
According to a NY Times story:
According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented. The effect is most pronounced, according to some studies, in Texas and other states that execute condemned inmates relatively often and relatively quickly.
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It gets better:
A study by Joanna Shepherd, based on data from all states from 1997 to 1999, finds that each death sentence deters 4.5 murders and that an execution deters 3 additional murders.28 Her study also investigates the contested question whether executions deter crimes of passion and murders by intimates. Although intuition might suggest that such crimes cannot be deterred, her own finding is clear: all categories of murder are deterred by capital punishment.29 The deterrent effect of the death penalty is also found to be a function of the length of waits on death row, with a murder deterred for every 2.75 years of reduction in the period before execution.30
Importantly, this study finds that the deterrent effect of capital punishment protects African-American victims even more than whites. –[Sunstein PDF]
Capital punishment, the most evil of all the attributes of the racist American justice system, turns out to save the lives of African-Americans!
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