Capital Punishment William Tucker Summary

Article Summary #1:

Author William Tucker uses his 2000 American Spectator article to explain why the death penalty is actually a deterrent to criminals. Tucker analyzes the statistics of crime over the years and concludes that when death penalty rates are up, murder rates are down, and when execution rates decrease, the rate of homicides rises (par. 13). While many criminologists believe that the death penalty doesn’t affect the amount of murders that take place in America, Tucker counters by saying, “The results are plain to see. Beginning at almost the exact point when executions ended, murder soared to unprecedented heights. The murder rate tied the 1933 record in 1973, broke it in 1974, broke it again in 1980, and peaked a third time

25). Using national and state data to create a judicial experiment, Dezhbakhsh and Shepherd managed to prove that capital punishment lowers murder rates by giving evidence that discounted other outside sources that may affect crime rates. The Supreme Court made a moratorium in 1972 that outlawed the death penalty. In their article published in the Economic Inquiry in 2006, the authors compare the before and after data on murder and execution rates that were affected by the moratorium. Dezhbakhsh and Shepherd found, “We can identify three distinct periods in Figure 1: (1) the early 1960s with high (but falling) executions and falling murder rates, (2) 1964 to the mid- to late 1970s with very few executions and rapidly rising murder rates, and (3) 1990 to 2000 with soaring executions and sharply declining murder rates” (par. 25). In their article, the authors also take into account outside variables that could affect the crime rate and act as a deterrent as opposed to the death penalty. While unemployment may have a small effect on crime rate, income or the amount of police present do not, so the overall finding is that the death penalty dictates the rise and fall in crime (Dezhbakhsh & Shepherd, par. 36). After using many formulas to calculate the correlation between crime rates

Von Drehle gives five possible reasons are to why the death penalty isn’t effective: America has still not found a successful way to administer it, crime rate isn’t as high as previous years, there are no longer any justifiable reasons to use it as a sentence, it’s too costly, and it is like a lottery game when deciding who actually deserves the punishment (par. 13, 26, 31, 40, 46). Von Drehle uses current statistics from the last few years and discovers that society still hasn’t decided what way is best to put prisoners to death. Lethal injection doesn’t always work, electrocution is inhumane, firing squad may be too gruesome (para. 14, 15). He then goes on to make the argument that crime rate has dropped in recent years, which leads to less executions, which lessens the deterrent effect. Death was the optimal choice for getting rid of dangerous criminals, but recently, technology and jail facilities have advanced so much that keep prisoners in jail without parole seems more of an ideal option instead of going through the lengthy and expensive process of execution. Von Drehle writes, “The fact that this alternative to capital punishment is now a practical possibility has fed the shift in public opinion, for most people realize that being locked in a solitary cell forever is a terrible punishment. Indeed, some argue it