Homicide and Capital Punishment

Capital punishment, gun control, and personal violence (suicide and homicide).

WALTER C. RECKLESS MEMORIAL LECTURE Death and Deterrence Redux: Science, Law and Causal Reasoning on Capital Punishment

Long before the U.S. Supreme Court restored capital punishment in 1976, proponents of the death penalty claimed that executions save lives by deterring would-be murderers from lethal violence. The more recent ascension of deterrence as a rationale for capital punishment in the 1970s coincided with a series of landmark Supreme Court cases that first abolished and then reinstated the death penalt...

Deterrence and the Death Penalty: Partial Identification Analysis Using Repeated Cross Sections

Researchers have long used repeated cross sectional observations of homicide rates and sanctions to examine the deterrent effect of the adoption and implementation of death penalty statutes. The empirical literature, however, has failed to achieve consensus. A fundamental problem is that the outcomes of counterfactual policies are not observable. Hence, the data alone cannot identify the deterr...

Assumptions Matter: Model Uncertainty and the Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment

The effectiveness of capital punishment in deterring homicides has remained unclear despite the fact that the Supreme Court’s moratorium on capital punishment and the subsequent adoption of capital punishment by a subset of states, combined with very different rates of execution across polities, would appear to be an ideal environment for revealing deterrence effects using panel data methods. O...

Learning from the Limitations of Deterrence Research

Public policy and scientific knowledge concerning deterrence have long been marching in different directions. Despite the proliferation of threestrikes, mandatory minimum, and concealed weapons laws and retention of capital punishment in 37 states, there is little credible evidence that changes in sanctions affect crime rates, and there is no credible evidence that capital punishment deters bet...