Study: Texas death penalty deters homicides
by Associated Press

Posted on January 6, 2010 at 3:02 PM

Updated today at 3:11 PM

HUNTSVILLE, Texas -- As many as 60 people may be alive today in Texas because two dozen convicted killers were executed last year in the nation�s most active capital punishment state, according to a study of death penalty deterrence by researchers from Sam Houston State University and Duke University.

A review of executions and homicides in Texas by criminologist Raymond Teske at Sam Houston in Huntsville and Duke sociologists Kenneth Land and Hui Zheng concludes a monthly decline of between 0.5 to 2.5 homicides in Texas follows each execution.

For the rest of the article see: http://www.khou.com/news/Study-Texas-death-penalty-a-homicide-deterrent-80825247.html

I'm sure that this will be immediately embraced and cited by all the people who kept saying they would support the death penalty except that there's no evidence it's a deterrent.

It's good to see support for the general deterrence argument. We all know the death penalty has the effect of special or specific deterrence. I'm sure public executions really helped general deterrence too--but they would be hardly decent under our evolving standards of decency!

Nah, the skeptics will just ask how 1/2 a homicide could have been prevented. See? Faulty numbers.

quote:

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Originally posted by AndreaW:
I'm sure that this will be immediately embraced and cited by all the people who kept saying they _would_ support the death penalty except that there's no evidence it's a deterrent.

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+1

But still have a way to go before anyone matches 5 Texas executions in one day:


http://crimeblog.dallasnews.com/

Anyone read Prof David Dow's new book against the death penalty?

http://crimeblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2010/01/david-

[This message was edited by John A. Stride on 01-20-10 at .]

No, but I had him for contracts and I could probably score an autographed copy.

This is not the only recent study to challenge the conventional "wisdom" that the death penalty does not deter crime. In this New York Times article (yes, I said New York Times) from November of 2007, several studies concluded that carrying out a single execution saves any where from 3 to 18 lives.

I tried to paste the url to the article, but it did not work. Here's the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/us/18deter.html?_r=1