EVIDENCE FOR AND AGAINST THE DEATH PENALTY IN OHIO

  Arguments in Support of Capital Punishment

The Death Penalty Is a Deterrent

People have taken widely-divergent stances on the death penalty per se and the death penalty as a deterrent. It has been found that "intuition,", an emotional feeling about capital punishment, determines individual reactions. Interestingly enough, "if it were proved that [the death penalty] were or were not a deterrent, a large portion of those favoring or not favoring [it] would keep their basic pro or con positions."

Deterrence is often the primary reason given to support the retention of the death penalty. Supporters argue that if the death penalty deters one criminal from committing that final step towards murder, the penalty serves its purpose. To bolster the argument, proponents cite two comprehensive studies published in 2002 and 2003, which sustain earlier findings that capital punishment significantly deterred homicides in the United States.

The May 2002 study was conducted by the University of Colorado at Denver using 6,143 death sentences between 1977-1997 in the United States to investigate the impact of capital punishment on homicide. The study compared the changes in the states' murder rates to the probability of being executed for murder. The authors found not only that each execution has a significant deterrent effect, but that each commutation of a death sentence increases the number of homicides committed.

The 2003 study was conducted by researchers at Emory University and their "results suggest that capital punishment has a strong deterrent effect. An increase in any of the three probabilities - arrest, sentencing, or execution - tends to reduce the murder rate. In particular, each execution results, on average, in 18 fewer murders - with a margin of error of plus or minus 10." While early studies examined only national or statewide data, the Emory group tracked changes in murder rates and other data down to the county level. This study also controlled for the effect of other factors on murder rates, including age, race, unemployment, population density, other crime rates, and police-and prison-related variables.

In sum, "a better measure of the death penalty's deterrent effect can be found in the experience over time of those States that have enacted death-penalty statutes. Thus, to take the simplest example, the five States showing the greatest decline in murder rates for the years 1995-2002 compared to 1968-1976 - the years of no executions - are: Georgia, South Carolina, Florida, Delaware, and Texas. Each of these States has aggressively enforced the death penalty since Furman."

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