Murder and the Death Penalty

Abstract

Many people have asserted that the murder rate in the United States is increasing at an alarming rate. This means that they believe the number of murders is increasing much more rapidly than the population. But if one, instead of making the assertion, tries to prove it, he finds the task impossible. For we have no statistics of murders, as such. We can only guess at the number of murders by a consideration of the number of homicides or the number of persons convicted of murder. The number of homicides is considerably larger than the number of murders, for it includes, in addition to murder and manslaughter, the excusable or justifiable homicides, such as the killing of a burglar by a householder, the killing in self-defense when one has been assaulted, or the killing of an escaping prisoner by a policeman or prison guard. No one knows what proportion of the homicides are excusable or justifiable, though a guess that about one-third of them are of this kind has been made. Thus the number of homicides is larger than the number of murders. And it is evident that some murders are not followed by convictions, and the number of convictions is therefore smaller than the number of murders. Consequently when we learn from the statistical reports of the State of Massachusetts that one hundred homicides are committed there in a year, and that twenty-five persons are convicted of murder or manslaughter there in a year, the only thing we know about the number of murders committed is that it is somewhere between twenty-five and one hundred.