Figured this was threadworthy, NJ became the first state to do this in a long long time. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a6zXSC8hbW58&refer=home it is interesting how the tide has turned against capital punishment over the last ten years or so, I would suspect the wave of exonerations of innocents has done that. EDIT: WRONG FORUM MODS PLEASE I CAN HAS MOVED
I'm not a big death penalty guy; but I'm genuinely curious whether or not there will be any political backlash.
There very well maybe as the article cited a recent poll that said 78% of those surveyed in NJ were against repeal. I agree though that this is a first step. I've never liked the death penalty as our legal system is inherently imperfect and while we need to fight crime and provide for public safety there also needs to be a way to account for mistakes. The problem with the death penalty is that it removes the ability to possibly correct for a a mistake.
I'm a little torn on it. I believe in the death penalty and think it works. All the overturned convictions of people on death row frightens me.
well I believe it does. I just don't know if the criminal system can 100% positively identify who should and shouldn't be on death row.
How about putting prisoners to work? Make their lives a living hell. That'll be a much bigger deterrent than sitting in a cell doing nothing. I support the death penalty, but I'd be willing to have it overturned in a heartbeat if prisoners were forced to do manual labor(and I'm not just talking about laundry) as punishment for their crimes.
Consider that iIf the death penalty was a deterrent Texas that exectues more people than any other state would have a lower per capita rate of violent crime than Minnesota which has no death penalty.
Then people would lose jobs to low cost labor. I doubt that would go over well with the employment sector.
I don't think it's all that clear whether the death penalty has a deterrent effect or not. As of the mid to late 90's, the law and economics literature seemed to think that there was little or no deterrent effect relative to life in prison. But more recent research has found some measurable deterrence effects. In either case, your consideration above is meaningless. Unless Texas and Minnesota were alike in all respects besides the death penalty, your comparison says nothing about the efficacy of the death penalty, ceteris paribus. I personally think it's a bad idea because morals aside, any deterrence benefits to the public would have to incredibly huge to offset the downside risk of executing an innocent. And when you bring moral considerations into the ring, it only shifts it further in the direction of abolition.
That is a good point and I apologize for making a simplistic comparison between the states. I was just making a quick point to show that if the death penalty had a profound deterrent affect though it should be reflected in some comparison of states with and without the penalty but you are correct there are many factors. That said most of the studies I've seen haven't indicated any deterrent affect in regard to the death penalty and the biggest factor in reducing crime seems to be economic health as opposed to any punishment.
A friend of mine from law school, who is now a full fledged L&E professor at Chicago, once told me of some research that an economist (name i forgot) had done which suggests that the deterrrent effect from randomly executign people would be greater.
I think the death penalty does a good job killing poor minorities and sloppy serial killers. The deterrent basis assumes that you can't plea down from the DP sentence or hire a good expensive lawyer to get off the case.
I'm not sure there's all too much deterrent effect to the death penalty. I suppose if you really sat down and considered it, there is a deterrent - kill someone and get killed. But how many capital offenders believe that they'll even get caught, much less the consequences of that?
