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TMCNet: Houston Chronicle Rick Casey column: Commentary

[November 08, 2009]

Houston Chronicle Rick Casey column: Commentary

Nov 08, 2009 (Houston Chronicle - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) -- This is a different kind of murder mystery.

For years, social scientists have tried to determine whether the death penalty has a deterrent effect. Put another way, does the death penalty save lives? In 1967, sociologist Thorsten Sellin found no significant impact when he studied murder rates in adjacent states with differing approaches to capital punishment.

The next year, Nobel Prize economist Gary Becker developed a theory supporting the deterrent value of the death penalty, and eight years later one of his students published a study based on national statistics purporting to show that each execution saved eight lives.

The controversy led to a study commissioned by the National Academy of Sciences that found evidence of deterrence to be unconvincing.

More recent studies have reached conclusions all over the map. A national study in 2005 found "profound uncertainty" on the question and even suggested that executions might slightly increase the murder rate (possibly through a cultural "brutalization"). Another study that year suggested that each execution saves 150 lives.

All these studies are noted in a peer-reviewed article about to come out in Criminology, the journal of the American Society of Criminology. The study was conducted by Duke University Sociologist Kenneth C. Land, Sam Houston State University criminologist Raymond Teske Jr. and one of Land's graduate students, Hui Zheng.

Land is a prominent specialist on research methodology. He earned his doctorate at the University of Texas and chaired Duke's sociology department from 1986 to 1997.

After reviewing earlier studies, these authors came to the conclusion that the death penalty is used too sporadically and inconsistently around the nation for studies on national data to accurately measure its effect on crime.

They decided to focus their study by taking advantage of Texas' gift to social science, what they call "an orgy of executions in Texas beginning in 1994," during which time the state provided more than a third of the nation's executions.

To measure the impact of executions, the authors looked at two distinct periods.

The first was from 1980 through 1993, when for a variety of legal reasons, executions were relatively infrequent and uncertain. In those years there were about eight executions a year, and about five convicts a year removed from death row for various reasons.

Executions triple A series of legal decisions and changes in law designed to speed up executions led to a dramatic change after 1994. From then through 2005, the number of annual executions tripled and the rate of prisoners being removed from death row plummeted.

Using sophisticated statistical models, the researchers tested the impact of the larger number of executions.

They found that many earlier studies had vastly overestimated the effect, but the number of murders did go down in the short-term aftermath of executions.

Based on two different statistical models, they found the effect in the months after each execution to be a reduction of between 0.5 to 2.5 homicides.

That may not sound like much, but as the authors note, "even the estimated .5 deterrent per execution yields an estimated reduction in the expected numbers of monthly homicides of 5 to 10 during the subsequent 12 months, which is substantial." I'm sure this isn't the last word on the issue. That's no mystery. Here's the mystery: This study and previous ones show no correlation between the amount of publicity executions receive and their deterrent effect.

"We have no theory on that," Teske said on Friday. After a few more questions, he said, "I hear your frustration. If I wasn't working with one of the top guys in the nation, my confidence would be shaken." One other mystery: The study shows, as other studies have, more impact on the kinds of murders that don't qualify for the death penalty than on those that do.

rick.casey@chron.com To see more of the Houston Chronicle, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.HoustonChronicle.com. Copyright (c) 2009, Houston Chronicle Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.

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