Death Penalty Research: Deterrence, Public Opinion & Policy
This paper presents an amicus brief examining what the scientific literature reveals about capital punishment in the United States. Beginning with a global overview of which countries still practice the death penalty, the paper traces the historical evolution of execution methods and situates American practice within the broader post-Enlightenment decline of capital punishment worldwide. A literature review synthesizes peer-reviewed studies on the deterrent effect of the death penalty, including econometric analyses and panel data critiques, finding that the evidence for deterrence is weak and methodologically contested. The discussion concludes that support for capital punishment in the United States appears to be largely values-based and culturally derived rather than grounded in empirical evidence of effectiveness.
- Introduction: Global context and scope of US death penalty
- Background: History of capital punishment methods and policy
- Literature Review: Empirical studies on deterrence and their critiques
- Discussion: Values-based support despite weak deterrence evidence
- Works Cited: Peer-reviewed and survey sources cited
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper adopts the amicus brief framing to position itself as evidence-based commentary, lending authority to its policy conclusions by grounding them in peer-reviewed research rather than personal opinion.
- It presents both sides of the deterrence debate fairly — acknowledging studies that support a deterrent effect before methodologically dismantling them — demonstrating intellectual honesty.
- The integration of public-opinion survey data (Texas Crime Poll) alongside econometric studies enriches the argument by showing that even supporters of capital punishment are skeptical of its effectiveness, suggesting the issue is primarily cultural and values-driven.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates counter-argument and rebuttal as a structural technique. It first concedes that some peer-reviewed studies appear to support a deterrent effect of capital punishment, then systematically critiques the underlying statistical methodologies of those studies using more recent scholarship. This move — acknowledge, then undercut — is a model for evidence-based academic argumentation.
Structure breakdown
The paper opens with a global contextual frame, narrows to the U.S. setting, and provides historical background on execution methods. The literature review is the analytical core, organized chronologically and by methodology. The discussion synthesizes findings from both the empirical studies and the survey data, culminating in a policy conclusion. The Works Cited section follows APA-style formatting. This funnel structure — broad to specific to policy recommendation — is well-suited to the amicus brief genre.
Introduction
Nearly all civilizations in the modern world have terminated their acceptance of the death penalty as an acceptable punishment. The individual countries that continue the practice of capital punishment within their official criminal justice systems include the United States, Sudan, China, Egypt, Kuwait, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan. Each of these countries still considers it their right to execute prisoners for certain crimes and does so on a regular basis. The countries with the highest per capita rates of its usage include Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia; the United States holds the number four position behind these Middle Eastern countries.
Furthermore, the United States is alone among industrialized Western nations in its continued use of this form of punishment. Adding another layer of complexity, there is also mixed usage and support of the death penalty among the individual states within the US. Many states have banned the death penalty through legislative measures, most under the basis of ethical or moral reasoning, while other justifications are more pragmatic in nature. Given this context and the declining trajectory of support for the death penalty, this analysis provides an overview of the scientific research that has been conducted relative to capital punishment in the modern US context.
Background
Capital punishment, or the death penalty, is premised on the concept that someone convicted of a heinous crime — one so severe that it is punishable by taking the individual's life (a capital crime) — may be lawfully executed by the state. After conviction by the relevant authority, the criminal justice system may take the life of the convicted through a variety of different methods. The specific methods of execution have a deep history, and it is striking to read about the brutal forms that have been designed over the millennia to punish criminals. In previous generations, people were hanged, burned, shot, and even drawn and quartered, to name a few.
The present generation of execution practices is comparatively more humane by any objective measure, but is still prone to problems. For example, lethal injection has become the preferred method of execution, but there have been many cases in which mishaps arose and executions did not proceed smoothly. There are also continued problems in acquiring the drugs used in lethal executions, as many manufacturers have denied sales of these substances for use in capital punishment cases on moral grounds.
Public policy produced by decision-makers whose value-based belief systems are not grounded in some level of objectivity can often produce counterproductive policies with unintended consequences. The overall trend identifiable in humanity post-Enlightenment has been to pursue a more humane, civil, and ethical treatment of all people. This has resulted in the declining popularity of practices such as capital punishment and has even led to the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations. However, despite the overall trajectory of humanity's moral compass slowly improving, it is also necessary to consider the evidence and determine what the scientific literature indicates about such practices.
Literature Review
Research has studied the death penalty in the US from a wide variety of perspectives. In the United States, the state of Texas has become the leading advocate of the death penalty, and researchers have been able to study attitudes toward capital punishment in that state. For example, in 2002, as part of the annual Texas Crime Poll, respondents were asked about their confidence in the administration of the death penalty, their support for the death penalty, and their support for a moratorium on executions. The results indicate that, although a majority of respondents supported the death penalty, a substantial proportion lacked confidence in its use and supported a moratorium on executions. Among those lacking confidence and those supporting a moratorium, strong majorities still maintained support for the death penalty (68% and 73%, respectively). These findings suggest that death penalty attitudes may be largely value-expressive (Vollum, Longmire, & Buffington-Vollum, 2004).
Although support for the death penalty may be largely values-based in certain regions, the justification for these values typically relates to a few distinct lines of reasoning. Most advocates of the death penalty point to the practice as a crime deterrent. The deterrent argument holds that the enforcement of capital punishment provides an incentive for individuals not to commit crimes, because they know they could receive this form of punishment. Over the years, multiple research efforts have been conducted that appear to support the deterrent position.
For example, economists began studying capital punishment in the 1970s, using regression models to analyze U.S. aggregate data for 1933–1969 and state-level data for 1940 and 1950, and found a significant deterrent effect (Dezhadbksh, Rubin, & Shepherd, 2003). Another study, conducted in 2003, examined not only the impact of capital punishment through executions but also the effect of commutations and removals from death row on the homicide rate during moratorium periods and in the ensuing time periods afterward (Mocain & Gittings, 2003). This study concluded that there was in fact a significant deterrent effect of the death penalty — based on execution, removal, and commutation rates — on the homicide rate. It was estimated from the results that each additional execution would subsequently decrease the total number of homicides by roughly five.
Although many peer-reviewed studies appear to suggest that capital punishment has some deterrent benefits, others have questioned the methodology used in such efforts and have produced alternative evidence. The more specific issues relate to the statistical methods used to study these social trends. The models designed to study the death penalty are complex and are consequently forced to make significant assumptions about human behavior and how crime manifests.
For example, a more recent study presented a persuasive argument that the underlying behavioral model used to build panel data regressions in previous studies was limited. It discussed current norms regarding best practices in the use of panel data and identified other methodological problems (Chalfin, Haviland, & Raphael, 2013). Furthermore, the model used to determine the deterrent effect of capital punishment largely discredited the informativeness of previous studies based on their data, and criticized the lack of theoretical mechanisms involved as well as the likely presence of unobserved confounders (Chalfin, Haviland, & Raphael, 2013). Other studies have reached similar conclusions using data from the same periods, finding that under the weakest restrictions there is substantial ambiguity: we cannot rule out the possibility that having a death penalty statute substantially increases or decreases the homicide rate. Therefore, the debate about deterrence will likely linger indefinitely (Manski & Pepper, 2013).
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