On Tuesday, the New Hampshire Senate Judiciary Committee released a bill that would repeal the death penalty in the Granite state, setting up a likely senate-wide vote on the future of capital punishment next week. As legislators across the state ponder their final votes, The Dartmouth sat down with mathematics professor emeritus John Lamperti, who has investigated the impact of capital punishment on the U.S. the murder rate.
Why did you initially become interested in studying capital punishment from an academic perspective?My interest in it goes back to the 1970s, when Vermont was revising its whole criminal code. There was an election that year, and a candidate for attorney general — I think he was the Democrat — was campaigning partly on the issue of “we ought to have capital punishment in Vermont.” I went to hear him talk one day, and I truly believed I had an open mind on the subject. And then I heard this guy, who was running for attorney general, make what I thought was an insulting statement about statistics. He started off with, “now I don’t believe in statistics, but,” and then he quoted some numbers about how during that period — there hadn’t been any executions, there was a national moratorium — the murder rate had gone up somewhat. He sort of implied that this proved we needed capital punishment. And this was such a naïve argument, that I thought surely some people somewhere have done some serous studies about whether capital punishment results in lower murder rates. I read everything I could find, and I became more and more convinced that capital punishment was just plain bad public policy. And so I got involved in studying the deterrence issue.
What advice would you give to state legislators as they look at the bill?Well, I think they should vote to abolish [the death penalty]. It’s certainly not necessary in New Hampshire in particular — there is no reason at all to have this on the books. New Hampshire hasn’t executed anyone for about 60 or 70 years.
Do you think that legislation in New Hampshire is indicative of a national trend to move away from the use of the death penalty?There’s very much a national trend. Back in the 1970s, when I got interested in this, things had been pretty static for a long time. There were a handful of states that hadn’t had capital punishment for many years, but there were only a few, and most of them had had it. But the picture hadn’t changed. It’s changed tremendously in the last 30 years.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
