Ever since a young Edwin Sutherland first published research on the
issue in 1925,2
criminologists have been interested in the question of
whether the death penalty is a more effective deterrent to criminal homicide
than long-term imprisonment. At least until a decade ago, there was
widespread consensus among criminologists that the death penalty could
not be justified on deterrence grounds. In November 1989, in part because
“social science research ha[d] found no consistent evidence of crime
deterrence through execution,” the American Society of Criminology
passed a resolution condemning the death penalty, one of only two public
policy positions the organization has ever taken.3
In 1996, Radelet and
Akers surveyed sixty-seven leading American criminologists regarding
their opinion about the empirical research on deterrence and found that the
overwhelming majority of the experts agreed that the death penalty never
has been, is not, and never could be superior to long prison sentences as a
deterrent to criminal violence.4
The research reported in this Article was designed to update the 1996
study and assess if any recent deterrence studies have modified the beliefs
of the world’s leading criminologists. The results indicate that only a small
minority of top criminologists—10% or less, depending on how the
question is phrased—believes that the weight of empirical research studies
supports the deterrence justification for the death penalty.
These results come despite the publication of several widely-cited
studies conducted in the last half dozen years (primarily by economists) that
claim to show the death penalty has deterrent effects that criminologists
have not spotted.5
In 2002, the Washington Post published an article under
the catchy title Murderous Pardons? about research by econometrician
Naci Mocan purporting to find that each execution led to 5-6 fewer
homicides, and for every three additional “pardons” of a death row inmate,