To the Editor:
Congratulations on your last week's supplement on capital punishment. I'm happy to see that many people, especially students, are seriously rethinking the issue -- whatever their conclusions. I've been involved with this question since 1976. My motivation has been to learn if the death penalty is really a deterrent to murder-- or, more accurately, a better deterrent than life in prison. This is a slippery statistical problem, and of course controlled experiments are impossible.
Still, many sensible studies have been done and there is a clear conclusion: As practiced in the United States, capital punishment has no detectable effect on the rate of homicide. I testified about this at the N.H. Legislature last month. My written testimony, which summarizes the evidence on deterrence, is available at my web site for anyone interested. (www.math.dartmouth.edu/~lamperti) I'd be glad to discuss it.
Deterrence is the only pragmatic benefit claimed for the death penalty. If that benefit isn't real, what's left? Basically, just the feeling that capital punishment is right, that only death provides the proper degree of retribution. Those emotions are natural in some cases, but they must be weighed against the known negatives of capital punishment. The worst of these, I think, is the certainty that more than a few innocent people have been and will be condemned to die. There are others. For me, abolishing capital punishment is a "good government" issue rather than a moral absolute. It has no practical benefit, and it has high social and even monetary costs. Feelings about the "justice" of executions, feelings which not everyone shares, are not a sound basis for an important public policy.
