Death penalty works
New Court rulings don't justify abolishing deterrence to murders.

By Michael Rushford

In two recent decisions, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned death sentences of convicted murderers, sparking renewed calls for an end to capital punishment.

A shifting majority on the court has struggled with the death penalty in recent years, sometimes exceeding its authority to grant new rights to murderers. But the two newest decisions focused on case-specific issues, adding very little to the larger debate. Both involve clearly guilty murderers who won new trials because of procedural errors:

�Ronald Rompilla was sentenced to death for the robbery and brutal stabbing murder of an Allentown, Pa., bar owner in 1988. The high court overturned his sentence with a narrow holding that his attorneys were ineffective because they failed to thoroughly investigate the record of his 1974 conviction for raping a woman at knifepoint.

�Thomas Joe Miller-El received a death sentence for the 1985 execution of a Holiday Inn employee during a robbery. He left a second victim permanently disabled. The high court granted him a new trial because prosecutors might have intentionally excluded some blacks from his jury.

Claims of ineffective assistance of counsel and biased jury selection are made in thousands of criminal cases each year. These claims rarely raise questions about the defendant's guilt and do not justify abolishing sentencing laws.

A growing body of research suggests that ending the death penalty would result in more murder victims. Studies released over the past several years by economists from Emory University, the University of Colorado, Clemson University, State University of New York, Western Illinois University, University of Houston and the University of Chicago, among others, found that for each murderer executed, five to 18 murders are prevented.

And in direct conflict with opponents' claims, recent Gallup and TNS/Washington Post/ABC polls have reported that public support for the death penalty has either remained steady at 65% or increased from 63% to 70% over the past five years. The fact that there have been nearly 27,000 fewer murders over this period may explain why Americans are not ready to abandon the death penalty for our worst murderers.


Michael Rushford is president of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which is based in Sacramento.

It is gratifying to have academics agree that the death penalty has its benefits. Thanks for the sharing the flip side of the coin. If execution of a person prevents one death, it has served its purpose.

Of course, USA Today only ran that article under a larger article ripping on the death penalty.

I am leery of studies that claim that each execution saves 5--27 innocents from murder. There are so many varibles to control for, I think it would be very difficult to say with any precision what the effect would be.

In any case, there are other studies that show no difference. The one I recall was in Arizona. In the early years of the 20th Century, Arizona abolished the death penalty for 2 years. Then they re-imposed it. Apparently Ariz., like most states at that time, was not shy about hanging murderers, i.e. they had a death penalty in fact, and not just in name. A comparison of the murder rate for the 2 years before abolition, the 2 years of abolition, and the 2 years after re-instatement of the death penalty showed no significant change in the murder rate.

I suspect most murderers, like most criminals, give little thought to the future, so a death penalty may not have much of an effect on such people. Of course, there are those who carefully plan their murder, and perhaps some of these people are disuaded by the D.P. But balancing out those, are people who use the D.P. as a means of suicide. People like that find the fact that there is a possibility of being executed to be a positive motive to commit capital murder.

Terry, let me get this right. You are suggesting that the DP may actually cause capital murder because there is a special class of offender who would kill to be killed?

That would have to rate as one of your more incredible theories. I certainly have to ask the judge if I could take you on voir dire before that opinion would reach the jury.

Kind of odd, to commit suicide by death penalty, when it could take 8 to 10 years to consummate the act in some states and 20 years to never in other states. Not saying that such is not the intent of some capital murderers, because obviously smarter people than I have determined that to be the case, but it still seems kind of on the fringe to me. And, how could a two-year research period prove anything -- especially way back in the 20th century? Seems like it would have taken 2 years to just get the word out to all potential murderers that Az had abolished their d.p., then about the time that all the killers get ready to do their deeds, Arizona re-instates the d.p., so those killers would not have known that the punishment has been brought back, then they get the word after it's too late to turn back. Not to mention that probably nobody knows which killers came into their "fullness of time" and went from happy young folks to murderously-minded criminals during the two-years before, during or after Arizona's moratorium. Or, which ones did the opposite and changed their minds from killing-intents to letting things go during the same time periods.

A defendant under a death sentence can't waive his appeal to the CCA, but after that he is free to not pursue any further appeals. And some do waive all further appeals, and are executed within a year or 2. I believe Chris Marshall's murderer did that, and he was executed relatively shortly after his trial (I think a year--not too sure).

Suicidal people can be terribly murderous. How many times have you heard of someone who murders his family, and before the SWAT team can take him, he shoots himself? People who "go Postal" and start shooting people in public are often suicidal. Such people are often killed by police before they are captured, but not always. How would the death penalty deter such a person?

Finally, even intelligent murderers who carefully plan their crimes often give no thought to the D.P. Ted Bundy was well educated, intelligent, and killed many women. If I recall correctly, he killed in different states, including Fla., which does not flinch from using the D.P. And in fact, he was executed by the State of Fla. If he was concerned about the D.P., why didn't he murder only in states without the D.P.?

As for the AZ experiment. Perhaps 2 years is too short a time to make a valid comparison. And A.P. brings up the very point I made: there are so many varibles, its hard to say what effect the D.P. has. However, I doubt that most people in AZ at the time were not quickly aware of the fact that the DP had been abolished, or that it had been reinstated. They may not have had the internet, but they had teletypes, telegraphs, phones, and newspapers that covered the news, and such a change of the law would have been big news.

Jeffrey Dahmer changed his location to Wisconsin because that state had no death penalty......

It seems unlikely anyone willing to violate the capital murder law would be deterred by much of anything (though it seems a most ineffective means of suicide). Certainly it is hard to estimate the percentage or number of persons so deterred. But, one thing for certain. They are permanently deterred from all criminal conduct once the needle is inserted.

Lets face it. It is extremely difficult to judge the effectiveness of any program of crime prevention, even after all these years of experimentation. See Nothing Works

Chris Marshall's killer, George Douglas Lott, was executed on 9-20-1994. He killed prosecutor Chris Marshall on July 1, 1992. Lott was received on death row on March 18, 1993. Lott also killed John Edwards in the courthouse shooting, and a judge was wounded in the incident.