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.
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.
Posts: 1116 | Location: Waxahachie | Registered: December 09, 2004
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!
Posts: 444 | Location: Austin, Texas, USA | Registered: January 06, 2010
quote: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.
+1
Posts: 2578 | Location: The Great State of Texas | Registered: December 26, 2001
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.
