EXECUTING MURDERERS DETERS MURDERS

One of the more popular moral-relativist criticisms of capital punishment is to claim that the death penalty does not deter murder. Of course, that is not its only purpose, nor even its primary purpose.

But guess what? Executing murderers does deter murder.

Roy Adler and Michael Summers, faculty members at Pepperdine University, published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on Friday, in which they show that the number of murders in the United States declined in the early 1990s, just after the number of executions began rising. You may need to be a subscriber to open the article. Their main point, however, is simple:

Most commentators who oppose capital punishment assert that an execution has no deterrent effect on future crimes. Recent evidence, however, suggests that the death penalty, when carried out, has an enormous deterrent effect on the number of murders. More precisely, our recent research shows that each execution carried out is correlated with about 74 fewer murders the following year.

Here, fair use, is the graphic:


And, by the way, executing a murderer deters future murders by that particular murderer 100%.