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I thought I read exactly the opposite recently, Copernicus.

EDIT: I am completely wrong. But an economist, Justin Wolfers, is arguing that the noise levels in the data is too large to draw conclusions and those that draw conclusions either way are doing so more on ideological blinders than any analysis.

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I don't think people commit more murders because of the death penalty. It has to be some sort of deterrent but how much of one would seem to be the question.

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This is interesting, from the Freakonomics NYT blog:
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Given the evidence I’ve examined, I believe that Wolfers is on the right side of this debate. There are recent studies of the death penalty — most bad, but some reasonable — that find it has a deterrent effect on crime. Wolfers and John Donohue published an article in the Stanford Law Review two years ago that decimated most of the research on the subject.


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Analyses of data stretching farther back in time, when there were many more executions and thus more opportunities to test the hypothesis, are far less charitable to death penalty advocates . On top of that, as we wrote in Freakonomics, if you do back-of-the-envelope calculations, it becomes clear that no rational criminal should be deterred by the death penalty , since the punishment is too distant and too unlikely to merit much attention.


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Thanks, my point was that I don't think the death penalty encourages many people to commit murder i.e. they commit murder because the death penalty exists but wouldn't commit murder if the death penalty didn't exist. So if that assumption is right then we have people who don't factor in the death penalty when they commit murder and those people who are discouraged from committing murder because the death penalty exists. The vast majority of people who commit murder may be those that don't factor in the death penalty when they murder.

Maybe there are statistics that show the death penalty does encourage people to murder when they otherwise wouldn't. I assume there isn't but I fully concede that could be wrong.