No More Death Penalty in New Mexico

[Dis]

I live in a poor neighborhood. I hear the things they say. Although maybe middle class people are just as bad? I can't say for sure.

These people think they are "owed" because they are poor. And think nothing of stealing from other people or businesses.

I'm just sick of people stealing from me. Yes I guess it shows I should move to a better neighborhood. Where people actually have respect for other people's property.

Yes I realize stealing is a long way off from murder. And should be discussed in another thread. But I wasn't the one who brought up welfare and crime rates.

[Wezil]

As wealth increases the nature of the immorality/crime changes.

[Lefty Scaevola]

The only reasonable justification for the DP is deterrence.

All sorts of theoretical reasons for it, but in current practice, where is is so rare and and so long deferred, I observe that in practice its main benefit is none of the theoretical ones, but is its use in scaring the more cowardly among the capital defendants into plea bargaining.
Now if it were much more common and expeditious, then much more of its theorized benefits could be achieved (as well as more of some its bad results).

[KrazyHorse]

its main benefit is [...] its use in scaring the more cowardly among the capital defendants into plea bargaining

This is true. But that is not a reasonable justification.

[SlowwHand]

[Docfeelgood]

[MikeH]

The DP in the US sense is stupid/pointless/wrong because

1. It costs a lot more, save those tax dollars.
2. You sometimes get the wrong person.
3. Once someone's dead they are no longer being punished.
4. It's not a deterrent.

[rah]

I used to support the DP but the way it is currently administered makes supporting difficult.

While in general it isn't much of a deterrent but when I was younger and doing research on it, I did come across a lot of interviews with convicts that had used fake weapons during robberies because they feared the death penalty. Since I never heard of a shopkeeper being killed by a fake weapon, I did consider this a positive aspect of the death penalty and almost a deterrent.

[KrazyHorse]

MikeH, rah:

The question of its deterrent value is actually quite an open one, as far as actual criminological research goes.

Mike: I really don't think you can categorically state that it is not a deterrent. The number we're looking for is murders deterred divided by people executed. And since even Texas fails to execute most of its murderers, the effect on murder rates is not a trivial thing to estimate.

rah: case interviews with people who commit crimes are not necessarily a reasonable means of estimating deterrent value. They provide some insight into the thought process, but are not particularly convincing as a statistical tool.

[rah]

KH, understood, and you'll notice that I didn't claim any. But if did convince me that the deterrent effect wasn't 0%.

[MikeH]

The main point is despite all the research done no-one has managed to conclusively prove that it is more of a deterrent than other forms of punishment (especially life imprisonment), so that is not a valid argument in its favour.

Personally I think the evidence is pretty convincing that the two things (murder rate and death penalty) aren't linked. Countries and states that abolish the death penalty don't see a statistically significant rise in murders.

The EU Memorandum on the death penalty is pretty good:

http://www.eurunion.org/legislat/deathpenalty/eumemorandum.htm

The most convincing argument, of course, is that the death penalty is un-Christian. Jesus preached forgiveness, not revenge.

[DaShi]

But isn't a life sentence far more cruel?

[KrazyHorse]

The main point is despite all the research done no-one has managed to conclusively prove that it is more of a deterrent than other forms of punishment (especially life imprisonment), so that is not a valid argument in its favour.

And nobody has managed to prove that it is NOT more of a deterrent, so that's not a valid argument against it.

Personally I think the evidence is pretty convincing that the two things (murder rate and death penalty) aren't linked. Countries and states that abolish the death penalty don't see a statistically significant rise in murders.

This is a ridiculous argument. A country like the US has over 10000 murders a year, but executed only 37 people last year. The only thing you can reasonably claim is that the number of murders deterred by each execution is probably less than a few hundred.



The whole point is that we're dealing with a punishment which is meted out only extremely rarely. Furthermore, heterogeneity in the legality/use of capital punishment between jurisdictions can be correlated with other heterogeneities which also have an impact on the murder rate To take two examples which would bias the estimates for the deterrent effect in opposite directions: if jurisdictions with more police officers also apply the death penalty more often, while more police officers leads to less murders, then cross-sectional comparisons would bias the estimates of deterrence effects upwards. In the opposite direction, if communities with large black minorities tend to apply the death penalty more often (due to some implicit racism on the part of the white majority) while black people tend to commit murder more often then cross-sectional comparisons would bias the estimates of deterrence effects downwards.

Here's an example of a serious academic work which finds a significant deterrent effect:

http://deathpenalty.procon.org/sourcefiles/The%20Deterrent%20Effect%20of%20Capital%20Punishment.pdf

This is not by any means the final word on the subject, but I do think that closing our eyes to the issue isn't a morally defensible course of action. We have as much of a duty to each statistically preventable victim of murder as we do to each murderer.

[SlowwHand]

38 last year. This site...cites 37 but if you had the numbers it's 38. 18 in Texas. 16 so far this year.

http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/number-executions-state-and-region-1976

CHARACTERISTICS OF DEATH ROW INMATES
The following information is taken from the Bureau of Justice Statistics: Capital Punishment and is the statistical data of the death row population for 12/31/06.

55.8% of the death row population is White, 41.9% is Black and 2.3% is of another race.

Men on death row make up 98.3%, while women make up 1.7%

The median education level of death row inmates is 11th grade.

Of death row inmates, 54.8% have never married, 20.6% are divorced or separated, 21.7% are currently married and 3% are widowed.

8.4% of inmates had a prior homicide conviction.

65.5% had prior felony convictions.

Among all inmates under sentence of death, half were age 20 to 29 at the time of arrest; 11% were age 19 or younger; and fewer than 1% were age 55 or older.

The average age at time of arrest was 28 years.

As of 12/31/06, 33% of all inmates were age 30 to 39, and 59% were age 25 to 44. 1.6% of inmates are under the age of 25, and 1.5% are older than 65.

7,115 people have been sentenced to death from 1977 until 2006.

Also, if you check the murder rates, they've dropped.

[Asher]

That's your opinion. As far as appeals, convicts are granted an appeal immediately, no matter what, including if they don't want it.

I love how Texas still thinks it's relevant to specify if a black man or white man is about to die.

Racism is alive and well, even if they pretend it's dead.