Issue Of Capital Punishment Research Articles

Disaggregation in Deterrence and Death Penalty Research: The Case of Murder in Chicago

The proper role, if any, of capital punishment in our criminal justice system is an issue of unparalleled discussion in professional literature. Over one thousand books, articles, and reports on one or more aspects of the death penalty question have appeared since the turn of the century. In addition, the death penalty debate is not confined solely to professional circles; it occupies a prominent role in the popular press, media, and periodicals. In fact, the literature is so voluminous and the moral, legal, ethical, and empirical issues involved are so diverse and complex, that even the most recognized contemporary authorities on capital punishment readily acknowledge the limitations of their knowledge and understanding.1 The death penalty issue that is the focus of the greatest discussion and polarization both in professional and lay literature is the question of deterrence: does capital punishment deter crime, and most notably, murder? More properly and practically stated, does capital punishment provide a more effective general deterrent to murder than alternative legal sanctions such as imprisonment? Social scientists-most notably sociologists and criminologistshave played a long and active role in addressing this question empirically, with all studies up until the mid-1970's rejecting the deterrence hypothesis for capital punishment. For example, over five decades of research in this country failed to show higher murder rates in abolition than death penalty states, an increase in the murder rate after some states abolished capital punishment, or a decrease in murder after some

The State as Killer

The issue of capital punishment is settled in other civilized countries. In the United States, the debate continues with no national resolution in sight. All the countries of Western Europe have banished the executioner and his return is not likely despite sporadic and feeble efforts by diehards on his behalf. In such countries as the Soviet Union and its satellites, South Africa, and the fundamentalist Moslem countries, no serious debate is possible: the firing squads are assembled and the gallows are in place. That a division of opinion on this subject persists in the United States testifies to a unique quality in the moral life of the nation. We are indeed different. Our penal technologists have labored long and cogitated deeply to discover new and more humane ways of killing prisoners. The gallows and the electric chair appeared to be too noisome and probably too painful for the prisoner, his executioner, and the witnesses-so many states adopted the lethal gas chamber. The expense of building such a facility proved more than some legislatures could countenance, so the injection of lethal toxins has combined economy with an apparent increase of humaneness. The condemned prisoner now has the same privilege as an unwanted animal being put to sleep. At a more rarefied level, abstract discourse commences. Abolitionists and retentionists both make use of collections of data to demonstrate, on the one hand, that no one has proved that capital punishment deters potential murderers and, on the other hand, that no one has proved that it does not deter. For a good many years, the statistics organized by Thorsten Sellin' seemed unanswerable. The negligible differences in the homicide rates of Michigan, an abolitionist state, and Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana, retentionist states, strongly indicated that the deterrent effects of the electric chair were not statistically significant. Retentionists found various unconvincing arguments to

On Capital Punishment

The issue of capital punishment is a very wide one; it has been discussed for centuries by philosophers, theologians, legal scholars, social scientists and reformers of all kinds. These discussions have involved a variety of types of reasoning: some are purely theoretical, some are highly technical, statistical or, at a further remove, methodological analyses. But they have always revolved around a simple, basic question: for or against? This is basically a moral question; because of its general character, because it has to do with moral considerations of a rather general nature for abolishing or retaining a legal institution, it also presents a problem for moral and legal philosophy.

Welfare Economic Aspects of Capital Punishment

Abstract. Much has been written in recent years concerning the issue of capital punishment. The major argument on the side of the retentionists appears to revolve around deterrence. Using postulates from modern welfare economics the authors demonstrate that the deterrence question is largely irrelevant. Attention is also given to extracting materials from the writings of earlier economists from Petty to Mill which may be helpful in resolving the issue. The conclusion which emerges is that capital punishment is not justifiable on economic grounds.

PUBLIC OPINION AND THE DEATH PENALTY IN SOUTH AFRICA

The role of public opinion in the formation of social policies has not been adequately assessed. In some cases public attitudes are highly congruent with progressive social ideals. In others public opinion has reacted strongly against attempts to introduce social reforms. The issue of capital punishment is a case in point. In the United Kingdom and the United States of America, it has been felt that in this area of criminal justice policy reform must precede public opinion. Capital punishment has been an integral part of South Africa's criminal justice legislation for many years and, contrary to trends in other western countries, the use of the death penalty has been gradually extended. The annual number of executions has risen steadily and is far higher than in other western countries. In response to these developments an abolitionist move ment, seeking to educate public opinion, has emerged. One of the major arguments for retention (and one that the abolitionists have had to face) is that the white electorate will not tolerate abolition. Public opinion in white South Africa does not wish the hangman to become redundant. The validity of this argument needs to be established. The degree to which opinion leaders and the man in the street support the death penalty needs to be assessed.

Varieties of Attack on the Death Penalty

The latest execution in the United States occurred on June 2, 1967. Since then, death sentences have been stayed as courts across the country consider a legal challenge to the constitution ality of the death penalty. This paper describes the distorting effect that capital punishment has had on the legal system and the discriminations in the way it has been administered—for example, in rape cases it is applied almost exclusively to Negroes convicted of raping while women. The legal attack focuses on those procedural vices that reflect the arbitrariness and irration ality inherent in capital punishment. Courts are being called on to subject the death penalty to a reasoned examination and to test its validity against the commands of the Constitution, while the number of persons on the nation's death rows continues to grow past the 500 mark. This confrontation on the issue of capital punishment is part of the more general conflict taking place over how society may best cope with its problems without resort to violence.

The Issue of Capital Punishment

The Issue of Capital Punishment

STABILITY OF THURSTONE SCALE VALUES AFTER 35 YEARS

Do attitude scales mean the same when used at different times and with different groups? If so, no difference should occur in scale values developed with the equal-appearing interval method among different generations and over several decades. Some indirect evidence is available regarding the constancy of one such instrument, viz., a scale of 24 items focusing on the social issue of capital punishment, using an 11point continuum of favorableness-unfavorableness.' In 1966, 49 upper undergraduate males in a class exercise in a southeastern technical universicy served as judges for deriving median scale values for the 24 statements. Thurstone's ( 6 ) scale values for the same items were generated by graduate srudents at the University of Chicago. Correlation of the values created in 1930 in Chicago and in 1966 in Atlanta by students, judging the favorableness of the statements toward the concept in question, yielded a value of 9 8 . Ferguson ( 2 ) reports reliabilities for these statements to range from .59 to .88; .44 was the split-half estimate for the present data. Apparently, the general favorableness toward capital punishment in 1966 does not differ appreciably from the views of judges of 1930 vintage. The unusually high relationship berween the scale values reflects the stability over time and among groups, at least for individuals in academic settings. This generalization applies to several kinds of attitudes. Hovland and Sherif ( 3 ) , comparing items on the concept of Negro scaled cwo decades apart, report an r of .96. And, Milholland ( 4 ) , though reducing the judges' hypothetical continuum to 9 piles or steps for attitudes toward the law, found product-moment rs of .98 between values on a 1930 scale developed by Katz ( 6 ) and a 37-member graduate class in 1956. Do these reports of comparable data imply no cultural change regarding selected social issues? Might not Ferguson's ( 2 ) suggestion that we compare group mean scores be more appropriate than just reviewing scale values established through the quasi-rational judging process?

The Death Penalty Abroad

Up to approximately the First World War, the issues involved in the controversy over the death penalty were relatively clear and simple. On one side there was the camp of the abolitionists. They were the humanitarians, the liberals, the progressives. Their movement, started in its contemporary form by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, was intrinsically connected with the development of the ideologies of the western society of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their argument ran along very clear-cut lines: capital punishment is below human dignity, functionally it does not do enough good to justify itself, and it leads to evil consequences. Opposing the abolitionists were the conservatives, the old-fashioned, the less-educated people, who either did not worry about the executions of criminals or even felt that these were indispensable to keep the human race in line. Now the abolitionists, now the conservatives, had the upper hand; but on the whole, the abolitionists seem to have better expressed the spirit of the epoch, and step by step the number of capital offenses listed in the criminal codes, the number of death sentences imposed by the courts, and the number of executions actually performed steadily diminished in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The issue of capital punishment for so-called political offenses was also quite clear. Except for some debatable borderline cases, the distinction between a criminal act and a political offense was pretty well established and generally agreed upon. The abolitionists attempted, of course, to expand also into the area of political offenses, but although they were in all probability responsible here too for some decrease in executions, they found the governmental tendency to exterminate the opponents of its political power an especially tough nut to crack. As a result, the abolitionists concentrated on the ordinary crimes and partly closed their eyes to political executions, which, by the way, were not very frequent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries except for the outburst of the French Revolution. The abolitionists had a hard time also with offenses within the military machine of the state and offenses in wartime. Here, as in the case of the political offenses, they met with the hard fact that the military simply would not give up the death penalty, usually arguing that, since the military personnel is professionally exposed to the threat of death, no effective control is possible without a like threat. Likewise, in time of war, when martial law was introduced, the threat to the very existence of the state and the lives of its people was successfully employed 137