Síðasta aftakan á Íslandi fór fram við Vatnsdalshóla árið 1830, en þar voru hálshöggvin þau Friðrik Sigurðsson og Agnes Magnúsdóttir eftir að hafa verið fundi sek um dauða tveggja manna í húsbruna. Höggstokkurinn er enn til og er varðveittur á Þjóðminjasafninu. Árið 1928 var dauðarefsing afnumin með lögum.
Flestar þjóðir eru búnar að banna dauðarefsingar, og ég held að Evrópa sé með öllu laus við þær – þó er ég ekki viss. Helstu þjóðirnar (þ.e. þær nafntoguðustu) sem enn bjóða upp á dauðarefsingu eru: Afganistan, Bandaríkin, Egyptaland, Indland, Íran, Írak, Kína, Kúba, Japan, Pakistan og Palestína. Árið 2004 tóku flestar aftökur sér stað í Kína, alls 3.400. Íran státar af 159 aftökum, Víetnam 64 og Bandaríkin 59.
Aftökuaðferðinni sem beitt er, er mismunandi eftir löndum. En Bandaríkjamenn nota mestmegnis banvæna sprautu eða rafmagnsstólinn, Írakar hálshöggva; Íranar, Pakistanar og Egyptar hengja; Kínverjar nota banvæna sprautuna og skjóta; og loks berja Afganir til dauða með grjóti, en það tíðkast reyndar líka í Íran.
Af þessum þjóðum sem enn leyfa dauðarefsingar, ættu Bandaríkjamenn að heita hvað siðmenntaðastir. Ég ætlaði aðeins að taka þá fyrir.
Í desembermánuði fór fram 1000 aftakan, frá því dauðarefsing var tekin upp að nýju árið 1976. Af þeim fóru 832 fram með banvænni sprautu, 152 með rafmagnsstóli, ellefu í gasklefa, þrír voru hengdir og tveir fóru fyrir aftökusveit – en aftökuaðferðir eru breytilegar eftir fylkjum. Síðan hafa þrettán menn reynst saklausir, eftir að búið var að drepa þá.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/ESPYexecbyyear.gif [Graf sem sýnir aftökur Bandaríkjamanna frá upphafi]
Ég myndi segja að banvæna sprautan sé mannúðlegust (ef það er viðeigandi að hugsa þannig í þessu samhengi). Fyrst er sjúklingurinn gefin svæfingarsprauta, þá er honum gefin sprauta sem lamar hann og loks er eitrinu dælt inn. Mér finnst undarlegt að þeir skuli bjóða upp á gasklefa, en það minnir frekar mikið á útrýmingarbúðir nasista. Rafmagnsstóllinn er örugglega verstur, en aðeins Nebraska notar hann án þess að bjóða upp á aðrar aðferðir. Þegar menn fara fyrir aftökusveit, er settur poki á höfuðið þeirra og fimm menn stilla sér upp fyrir framan þá með riffil. Skotskífa er hengd á sakamanninn til þess kúlurnar rati nú örugglega rétta leið. Einn riffillinn er hlaðinn púðurskotum til þess að friða samvisku böðulsins.
Ríkisstjóri fylkis [1] í Bandaríkjunum er veitt ákveðið náðunarvald, sem hann ræður hvort hann notar eða ekki. Ég veit ekki hversu oft þessu guðavaldi er beitt, en um daginn skellti Arnold Schwarzenegger skollaeyrunum við náðunarbeiðni manns frá Kaliforníu (sem hefði ellegar farið í ævilangt fangelsi). Afleiðingarnar urðu þær, að borgarstjórinn í Graz endurskírði einhverja íþróttahöll í höfuðið á einhverjum öðrum, en það vildi Arnold eftir að bæjarbúar höfðu gagnrýnt hann.
En mesti böðullinn í seinni tíð, er fyrrverandi ríkisstjóri Texas, George W. Bush. Hann neitaði 152 dauðadæmdum mönnum um náðun á sex ára valdatíð sinni, og sagðist sjálfur hafa gert það að vandlega ígrunduðu máli. Seinni tíma rannsóknir hafa leitt annað í ljós, en hægt er að taka dæmi um mann sem var með andlegan þroska á við sjö ára barn og var sprautaður eitri.
Æ, þetta er bara svo mikil hræsni. Hann sem kallar sjálfan sig miskunnsaman friðarhöfðingja, sem talar máli frelsis og réttlætis, og hvítar dúfur fljúga út um nasaholurnar á honum þegar hann ávarpar þjóð sína, en gerist síðan sekur um hvílíka grimmd sjálfur. Eða dómgreindarleysi? Erfitt að meta. En það er alla vega full ástæða til að tortryggja málaflutning hans, þegar fjallað er um illa meðferð og pyndingu fanga í Guanatamo fangelsinu.
Árið 2004 ályktaði New-York fylki að dauðarefsingar væru ekki réttlætanlegar frá sjónarhorni Stjórnarskrárinnar. Það verður athyglisvert að sjá hvort önnur fylki fylgi í kjölfarið.
Mjög góð umfjöllun var um þessi mál á blogginu hjá prófessorunum Gary Becker og Richard Posner (við University of Chicago) fyrir nokkrum vikum. Ég er að mörgu leiti sammála Becker í síðustu málsgreininni:
December 18, 2005 The Economics of Capital Punishment--Posner
The recent execution by the State of California of the multiple murderer Stanley "Tookie" Williams has brought renewed controversy to the practice of capital punishment, which has been abolished in about a third of the states and in most of the nations that the United States considers its peers; the European Union will not admit to membership a nation that retains capital punishment.
From an economic standpoint, the principal considerations in evaluating the issue of retaining capital punishment are the incremental deterrent effect of executing murderers, the rate of false positives (that is, execution of the innocent), the cost of capital punishment relative to life imprisonment without parole (the usual alternative nowadays), the utility that retributivists and the friends and family members of the murderer's victim (or in Williams's case victims) derive from execution, and the disutility that fervent opponents of capital punishment, along with relatives and friends of the defendant, experience. The utility comparison seems a standoff, and I will ignore it, although the fact that almost two-thirds of the U.S. population supports the death penalty is some, albeit weak (because it does not measure intensity of preference), evidence bearing on the comparison.
Early empirical analysis by Isaac Ehrlich found a substantial incremental deterrent effect of capital punishment, a finding that coincides with the common sense of the situation: it is exceedingly rare for a defendant who has a choice to prefer being executed to being imprisoned for life. Ehrlich's work was criticized by some economists, but more recent work by economists Hashem Dezhbakhsh, Paul Rubin, and Joanna Shepherd provides strong support for Ehrlich's thesis; these authors found, in a careful econometric analysis, that one execution deters 18 murders. Although this ratio may seem implausible given that the probability of being executed for committing a murder is less than 1 percent (most executions are in southern states--50 of the 59 in 2004--which that year had a total of almost 7,000 murders), the probability is misleading because only a subset of murderers are eligible for execution. Moreover, even a 1 percent or one-half of 1 percent probability of death is hardly trivial; most people would pay a substantial amount of money to eliminate such a probability.
As for the risk of executing an innocent person, this is exceedingly slight, especially when a distinction is made between legal and factual innocence. Some murderers are executed by mistake in the sense that they might have a good legal defense to being sentenced to death, such as having been prevented from offering evidence in mitigation of their crime, such as evidence of having grown up in terrible circumstances that made it difficult for them to resist the temptations of a life of crime. But they are not innocent of murder. The number of people who are executed for a murder they did not commit appears to be vanishingly small.
It is so small, however, in part because of the enormous protraction of capital litigation. The average amount of time that a defendant spends on death row before being executed is about 10 years. If the defendant is innocent, the error is highly likely to be discovered within that period. It would be different if execution followed the appeal of the defendant's sentence by a week. But the delay in execution not only reduces the deterrent effect of execution (though probably only slightly) but also makes capital punishment quite costly, since there is a substantial imprisonment cost on top of the heavy litigation costs of capital cases, with their endless rounds of appellate and postconviction proceedings.
Although it may seem heartless to say so, the concern with mistaken execution seems exaggerated. The number of people executed in all of 2004 was, as I noted, only 59. (The annual number has not exceeded 98 since 1951.) Suppose that were it not for the enormous delays in execution, the number would have been 60, and the additional person executed would have been factually innocent. The number of Americans who die each year in accidents exceeds 100,000; many of these deaths are more painful than death by lethal injection, though they are not as humiliating and usually they are not anticipated, which adds a particular dread to execution. Moreover, for what appears to be a psychological reason (the "availability heuristic"), the death of a single, identified person tends to have greater salience than the death of a much larger number of anonymous persons. As Stalin is reported to have quipped, a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
But that's psychology; there is an economic argument for speeding up the imposition of the death penalty on convicted murderers eligible for the penalty; the gain in deterrence and reduction in cost are likely to exceed the increase in the very slight probability of executing a factually innocent person. What is more, by allocating more resources to the litigation of capital cases, the error rate could be kept at its present very low level even though delay in execution was reduced.
However, even with the existing, excessive, delay, the recent evidence concerning the deterrent effect of capital punishment provides strong support for resisting the abolition movement.
A final consideration returns me to the case of "Tookie" Williams. The major argument made for clemency was that he had reformed in prison and, more important, had become an influential critic of the type of gang violence in which he had engaged. Should the argument have prevailed? On the one hand, if murderers know that by "reforming" on death row they will have a good shot at clemency, the deterrent effect of the death penalty will be reduced. On the other hand, the type of advocacy in which Williams engaged probably had some social value, and the more likely the advocacy is to earn clemency, the more such advocacy there will be; clemency is the currency in which such activities are compensated and therefore encouraged. Presumably grants of clemency on such a basis should be rare, since there probably are rapidly diminishing social returns to death-row advocacy, along with diminished deterrence as a result of fewer executions. For the more murderers under sentence of death there are who publicly denounce murder and other criminality, the less credibility the denunciations have.
Posted by Richard Posner at 07:53 PM | Comments (58) | TrackBack
More on the Economics of Capital Punishment-BECKER
Posner has a good discussion of the various issue related to capital punishment. I will concentrate my comments on deterrence, which is really the crucial issue in the acrimonious debate over capital punishment. I support the use of capital punishment for persons convicted of murder because, and only because, I believe it deters murders. If I did not believe that, I would be opposed because revenge and the other possible motives that are mentioned and discussed by Posner, should not be a basis for public policy.
As Posner indicates, serious empirical research on capital punishment began with Isaac Ehrlich's pioneering paper. Subsequent studies have sometimes found much weaker effects than he found, while others, including a recent one cited by Posner, found a much larger effect than even that found by Ehrlich. The available data are quite limited, however, so one should not base any conclusions solely on the econometric evidence, although I believe that the preponderance of evidence does indicate that capital punishment deters.
Of course, public policy on punishments cannot wait until the evidence is perfect. Even with the limited quantitative evidence available, there are good reasons to believe that capital punishment deters murders. Most people, and murderers in particular, fear death, especially when it follows swiftly and with considerable certainty following the commission of a murder. As Posner indicates, the deterrent effect of capital punishment would be greater if the delays in its implementation were much shortened, and if this punishment was more certain to be used in the appropriate cases. But I agree with Posner that capital punishment has an important deterrent effect even with the way the present system actually operates.
Opponents of capital punishment frequently proclaim that the State has no moral right to take the life of anyone, even a most reprehensible murderer. Yet that is absolutely the wrong conclusion for anyone who believes that capital punishment deters. To show why, suppose that for each murderer executed (instead of say receiving life imprisonment), the number of murders is reduced by three- which is a much lower number than Ehrlich's estimate of the deterrent effect. This implies that for each murderer not given capital punishment, three generally innocent victims would die. This argument means that the government would indirectly be "taking" many lives if it did not use capital punishment. The lives so taken are usually much more worthwhile than that of the murderers who would be spared execution. For this reason, the State has a "moral" obligation to use capital punishment if such punishment significantly reduces the number of murders and saves lives of innocent victims.
Saving three other lives for every person executed seems like a very attractive trade-off. Even two lives saved per execution seem like a persuasive benefit-cost ratio for capital punishment. But let us go further and suppose only one life was saved for each murderer executed. Wouldn’t the trade-off still be desirable if the life saved is much better than the life taken, which would usually be the case? As the deterrent effect of capital punishment is made smaller, at some point even I would shift to the anti-capital punishment camp. But given the difference between victims and murderers, the deterrent effect would have to be considerable less than one person saved per murderer executed before I would shift positions, although account should also be taken of the considerable expense involved in using capital punishment.
Of course, one wants to be sure that the number of persons wrongly executed for murder is a very small fraction of the total number executed. Posner argues convincingly that the safeguards built into the American system are considerable. They do not prevent any innocent persons from being executed, but they certainly make the risk very low. Capital punishment cannot be used if the goal is never to erroneously execute anyone, but then its deterrent effect is lost completely.
European governments are adamantly opposed to capital punishment, and some Europeans consider the American use of this punishment to be barbaric. But Europeans have generally been "soft" on most crimes during the past half-century. For a long time they could be smug because their crime rates were well below American rates. But during the past twenty years European crime has increased sharply while American rates have fallen-in part because American apprehension and conviction rates have increased considerably. Now some European countries have higher per capita property crime rates than the United States does, although violent crimes are still considerably more common in the United States. At the same time that America was reducing crime greatly in part by greater use of punishments, many European intellectuals continued to argue that not just capital punishments, but punishments in general, do not deter.
To repeat, the capital punishment debate comes down in essentials to a debate over deterrence. I can understand that some people are skeptical about the evidence, although I believe they are wrong both on the evidence and on the common sense of the issue. It is very unpleasant to take someone's life, even a murderer's life, but sometimes highly unpleasant actions are necessary to deter even worse behavior that takes the lives of innocent victims.
Þeir fátækustu fá ekki jafn góða verjendur og hinir. Þeir fá vitleysinga sem skipaðir eru af ríkinu sem er að reyna að koma þeim fyrir lás og slá (eða drepa þá). Svo sofa þessir vitleysingar í réttarsalnum og er alveg sama um "skjólstæðing sinn". Svo er annað: Bandaríska réttarkerfið gengur út á 12 "jafningja" sem eru valdir af bæpi saksóknaranum og verjendanum til að hjálpa þeirra máli. Þ.e. mun fleiri en 12 eru fyrir og svo fá þeir neitunarvald til að taka burt þá sem gætu verið hliðhollir hinu liðinu. Réttarkerfið gengur út á tilfinningar en ekki lög. Ef þú spilar á tilfinningar vinnuru málið. Og svo núna þarftu ekki að fara með mál fyrir rétt með "patriot lögbótunum". Skuggalegt.
Ein spurning: Eru Patriot lögbæturnar eitthvað tengdar stríðinu gegn hryðjuverkum?
Og svona, þegar út í það er farið, hvernig virkar þetta stríð gegn hryðjuverkum? Bush hefur talað um að Bandaríkin eigi í stríði og að því megi hann beita stríðstímavaldi sem forseti. En... æ, ég á erfitt með að ná utan um þetta. Er einhvern veginn hægt að vinna þetta stríð? Og hvernig er það gert? Með því að drepa Osama Bin Laden? Þá er þetta ekki stríð gegn hryðjuverkum, heldur stríð gegn Bin Laden.
Eitt í viðbót. Ég var spurður af hverju ég hefði tekið aftökur fyrir, án þess að taka neina sérstaka afstöðu né komast að neinni niðurstöðu. Málið er, að ég var að lesa um aftökur á netinu og fannst staðreyndirnar í kring um þær athyglisverðar. Ég vildi bara vekja máls á þessu.
4 Comments:
Nokkur orð um aftökur
Síðasta aftakan á Íslandi fór fram við Vatnsdalshóla árið 1830, en þar voru hálshöggvin þau Friðrik Sigurðsson og Agnes Magnúsdóttir eftir að hafa verið fundi sek um dauða tveggja manna í húsbruna. Höggstokkurinn er enn til og er varðveittur á Þjóðminjasafninu. Árið 1928 var dauðarefsing afnumin með lögum.
Flestar þjóðir eru búnar að banna dauðarefsingar, og ég held að Evrópa sé með öllu laus við þær – þó er ég ekki viss. Helstu þjóðirnar (þ.e. þær nafntoguðustu) sem enn bjóða upp á dauðarefsingu eru: Afganistan, Bandaríkin, Egyptaland, Indland, Íran, Írak, Kína, Kúba, Japan, Pakistan og Palestína. Árið 2004 tóku flestar aftökur sér stað í Kína, alls 3.400. Íran státar af 159 aftökum, Víetnam 64 og Bandaríkin 59.
Aftökuaðferðinni sem beitt er, er mismunandi eftir löndum. En Bandaríkjamenn nota mestmegnis banvæna sprautu eða rafmagnsstólinn, Írakar hálshöggva; Íranar, Pakistanar og Egyptar hengja; Kínverjar nota banvæna sprautuna og skjóta; og loks berja Afganir til dauða með grjóti, en það tíðkast reyndar líka í Íran.
Af þessum þjóðum sem enn leyfa dauðarefsingar, ættu Bandaríkjamenn að heita hvað siðmenntaðastir. Ég ætlaði aðeins að taka þá fyrir.
Í desembermánuði fór fram 1000 aftakan, frá því dauðarefsing var tekin upp að nýju árið 1976. Af þeim fóru 832 fram með banvænni sprautu, 152 með rafmagnsstóli, ellefu í gasklefa, þrír voru hengdir og tveir fóru fyrir aftökusveit – en aftökuaðferðir eru breytilegar eftir fylkjum. Síðan hafa þrettán menn reynst saklausir, eftir að búið var að drepa þá.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/ESPYexecbyyear.gif
[Graf sem sýnir aftökur Bandaríkjamanna frá upphafi]
Ég myndi segja að banvæna sprautan sé mannúðlegust (ef það er viðeigandi að hugsa þannig í þessu samhengi). Fyrst er sjúklingurinn gefin svæfingarsprauta, þá er honum gefin sprauta sem lamar hann og loks er eitrinu dælt inn. Mér finnst undarlegt að þeir skuli bjóða upp á gasklefa, en það minnir frekar mikið á útrýmingarbúðir nasista. Rafmagnsstóllinn er örugglega verstur, en aðeins Nebraska notar hann án þess að bjóða upp á aðrar aðferðir. Þegar menn fara fyrir aftökusveit, er settur poki á höfuðið þeirra og fimm menn stilla sér upp fyrir framan þá með riffil. Skotskífa er hengd á sakamanninn til þess kúlurnar rati nú örugglega rétta leið. Einn riffillinn er hlaðinn púðurskotum til þess að friða samvisku böðulsins.
Ríkisstjóri fylkis [1] í Bandaríkjunum er veitt ákveðið náðunarvald, sem hann ræður hvort hann notar eða ekki. Ég veit ekki hversu oft þessu guðavaldi er beitt, en um daginn skellti Arnold Schwarzenegger skollaeyrunum við náðunarbeiðni manns frá Kaliforníu (sem hefði ellegar farið í ævilangt fangelsi). Afleiðingarnar urðu þær, að borgarstjórinn í Graz endurskírði einhverja íþróttahöll í höfuðið á einhverjum öðrum, en það vildi Arnold eftir að bæjarbúar höfðu gagnrýnt hann.
En mesti böðullinn í seinni tíð, er fyrrverandi ríkisstjóri Texas, George W. Bush. Hann neitaði 152 dauðadæmdum mönnum um náðun á sex ára valdatíð sinni, og sagðist sjálfur hafa gert það að vandlega ígrunduðu máli. Seinni tíma rannsóknir hafa leitt annað í ljós, en hægt er að taka dæmi um mann sem var með andlegan þroska á við sjö ára barn og var sprautaður eitri.
Æ, þetta er bara svo mikil hræsni. Hann sem kallar sjálfan sig miskunnsaman friðarhöfðingja, sem talar máli frelsis og réttlætis, og hvítar dúfur fljúga út um nasaholurnar á honum þegar hann ávarpar þjóð sína, en gerist síðan sekur um hvílíka grimmd sjálfur. Eða dómgreindarleysi? Erfitt að meta. En það er alla vega full ástæða til að tortryggja málaflutning hans, þegar fjallað er um illa meðferð og pyndingu fanga í Guanatamo fangelsinu.
Árið 2004 ályktaði New-York fylki að dauðarefsingar væru ekki réttlætanlegar frá sjónarhorni Stjórnarskrárinnar. Það verður athyglisvert að sjá hvort önnur fylki fylgi í kjölfarið.
[1]
Fylkisstjóri ríkja í Bandafylkjunum?
Mjög góð umfjöllun var um þessi mál á blogginu hjá prófessorunum Gary Becker og Richard Posner (við University of Chicago) fyrir nokkrum vikum. Ég er að mörgu leiti sammála Becker í síðustu málsgreininni:
December 18, 2005
The Economics of Capital Punishment--Posner
The recent execution by the State of California of the multiple murderer Stanley "Tookie" Williams has brought renewed controversy to the practice of capital punishment, which has been abolished in about a third of the states and in most of the nations that the United States considers its peers; the European Union will not admit to membership a nation that retains capital punishment.
From an economic standpoint, the principal considerations in evaluating the issue of retaining capital punishment are the incremental deterrent effect of executing murderers, the rate of false positives (that is, execution of the innocent), the cost of capital punishment relative to life imprisonment without parole (the usual alternative nowadays), the utility that retributivists and the friends and family members of the murderer's victim (or in Williams's case victims) derive from execution, and the disutility that fervent opponents of capital punishment, along with relatives and friends of the defendant, experience. The utility comparison seems a standoff, and I will ignore it, although the fact that almost two-thirds of the U.S. population supports the death penalty is some, albeit weak (because it does not measure intensity of preference), evidence bearing on the comparison.
Early empirical analysis by Isaac Ehrlich found a substantial incremental deterrent effect of capital punishment, a finding that coincides with the common sense of the situation: it is exceedingly rare for a defendant who has a choice to prefer being executed to being imprisoned for life. Ehrlich's work was criticized by some economists, but more recent work by economists Hashem Dezhbakhsh, Paul Rubin, and Joanna Shepherd provides strong support for Ehrlich's thesis; these authors found, in a careful econometric analysis, that one execution deters 18 murders. Although this ratio may seem implausible given that the probability of being executed for committing a murder is less than 1 percent (most executions are in southern states--50 of the 59 in 2004--which that year had a total of almost 7,000 murders), the probability is misleading because only a subset of murderers are eligible for execution. Moreover, even a 1 percent or one-half of 1 percent probability of death is hardly trivial; most people would pay a substantial amount of money to eliminate such a probability.
As for the risk of executing an innocent person, this is exceedingly slight, especially when a distinction is made between legal and factual innocence. Some murderers are executed by mistake in the sense that they might have a good legal defense to being sentenced to death, such as having been prevented from offering evidence in mitigation of their crime, such as evidence of having grown up in terrible circumstances that made it difficult for them to resist the temptations of a life of crime. But they are not innocent of murder. The number of people who are executed for a murder they did not commit appears to be vanishingly small.
It is so small, however, in part because of the enormous protraction of capital litigation. The average amount of time that a defendant spends on death row before being executed is about 10 years. If the defendant is innocent, the error is highly likely to be discovered within that period. It would be different if execution followed the appeal of the defendant's sentence by a week. But the delay in execution not only reduces the deterrent effect of execution (though probably only slightly) but also makes capital punishment quite costly, since there is a substantial imprisonment cost on top of the heavy litigation costs of capital cases, with their endless rounds of appellate and postconviction proceedings.
Although it may seem heartless to say so, the concern with mistaken execution seems exaggerated. The number of people executed in all of 2004 was, as I noted, only 59. (The annual number has not exceeded 98 since 1951.) Suppose that were it not for the enormous delays in execution, the number would have been 60, and the additional person executed would have been factually innocent. The number of Americans who die each year in accidents exceeds 100,000; many of these deaths are more painful than death by lethal injection, though they are not as humiliating and usually they are not anticipated, which adds a particular dread to execution. Moreover, for what appears to be a psychological reason (the "availability heuristic"), the death of a single, identified person tends to have greater salience than the death of a much larger number of anonymous persons. As Stalin is reported to have quipped, a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic.
But that's psychology; there is an economic argument for speeding up the imposition of the death penalty on convicted murderers eligible for the penalty; the gain in deterrence and reduction in cost are likely to exceed the increase in the very slight probability of executing a factually innocent person. What is more, by allocating more resources to the litigation of capital cases, the error rate could be kept at its present very low level even though delay in execution was reduced.
However, even with the existing, excessive, delay, the recent evidence concerning the deterrent effect of capital punishment provides strong support for resisting the abolition movement.
A final consideration returns me to the case of "Tookie" Williams. The major argument made for clemency was that he had reformed in prison and, more important, had become an influential critic of the type of gang violence in which he had engaged. Should the argument have prevailed? On the one hand, if murderers know that by "reforming" on death row they will have a good shot at clemency, the deterrent effect of the death penalty will be reduced. On the other hand, the type of advocacy in which Williams engaged probably had some social value, and the more likely the advocacy is to earn clemency, the more such advocacy there will be; clemency is the currency in which such activities are compensated and therefore encouraged. Presumably grants of clemency on such a basis should be rare, since there probably are rapidly diminishing social returns to death-row advocacy, along with diminished deterrence as a result of fewer executions. For the more murderers under sentence of death there are who publicly denounce murder and other criminality, the less credibility the denunciations have.
Posted by Richard Posner at 07:53 PM | Comments (58) | TrackBack
More on the Economics of Capital Punishment-BECKER
Posner has a good discussion of the various issue related to capital punishment. I will concentrate my comments on deterrence, which is really the crucial issue in the acrimonious debate over capital punishment. I support the use of capital punishment for persons convicted of murder because, and only because, I believe it deters murders. If I did not believe that, I would be opposed because revenge and the other possible motives that are mentioned and discussed by Posner, should not be a basis for public policy.
As Posner indicates, serious empirical research on capital punishment began with Isaac Ehrlich's pioneering paper. Subsequent studies have sometimes found much weaker effects than he found, while others, including a recent one cited by Posner, found a much larger effect than even that found by Ehrlich. The available data are quite limited, however, so one should not base any conclusions solely on the econometric evidence, although I believe that the preponderance of evidence does indicate that capital punishment deters.
Of course, public policy on punishments cannot wait until the evidence is perfect. Even with the limited quantitative evidence available, there are good reasons to believe that capital punishment deters murders. Most people, and murderers in particular, fear death, especially when it follows swiftly and with considerable certainty following the commission of a murder. As Posner indicates, the deterrent effect of capital punishment would be greater if the delays in its implementation were much shortened, and if this punishment was more certain to be used in the appropriate cases. But I agree with Posner that capital punishment has an important deterrent effect even with the way the present system actually operates.
Opponents of capital punishment frequently proclaim that the State has no moral right to take the life of anyone, even a most reprehensible murderer. Yet that is absolutely the wrong conclusion for anyone who believes that capital punishment deters. To show why, suppose that for each murderer executed (instead of say receiving life imprisonment), the number of murders is reduced by three- which is a much lower number than Ehrlich's estimate of the deterrent effect. This implies that for each murderer not given capital punishment, three generally innocent victims would die. This argument means that the government would indirectly be "taking" many lives if it did not use capital punishment. The lives so taken are usually much more worthwhile than that of the murderers who would be spared execution. For this reason, the State has a "moral" obligation to use capital punishment if such punishment significantly reduces the number of murders and saves lives of innocent victims.
Saving three other lives for every person executed seems like a very attractive trade-off. Even two lives saved per execution seem like a persuasive benefit-cost ratio for capital punishment. But let us go further and suppose only one life was saved for each murderer executed. Wouldn’t the trade-off still be desirable if the life saved is much better than the life taken, which would usually be the case? As the deterrent effect of capital punishment is made smaller, at some point even I would shift to the anti-capital punishment camp. But given the difference between victims and murderers, the deterrent effect would have to be considerable less than one person saved per murderer executed before I would shift positions, although account should also be taken of the considerable expense involved in using capital punishment.
Of course, one wants to be sure that the number of persons wrongly executed for murder is a very small fraction of the total number executed. Posner argues convincingly that the safeguards built into the American system are considerable. They do not prevent any innocent persons from being executed, but they certainly make the risk very low. Capital punishment cannot be used if the goal is never to erroneously execute anyone, but then its deterrent effect is lost completely.
European governments are adamantly opposed to capital punishment, and some Europeans consider the American use of this punishment to be barbaric. But Europeans have generally been "soft" on most crimes during the past half-century. For a long time they could be smug because their crime rates were well below American rates. But during the past twenty years European crime has increased sharply while American rates have fallen-in part because American apprehension and conviction rates have increased considerably. Now some European countries have higher per capita property crime rates than the United States does, although violent crimes are still considerably more common in the United States. At the same time that America was reducing crime greatly in part by greater use of punishments, many European intellectuals continued to argue that not just capital punishments, but punishments in general, do not deter.
To repeat, the capital punishment debate comes down in essentials to a debate over deterrence. I can understand that some people are skeptical about the evidence, although I believe they are wrong both on the evidence and on the common sense of the issue. It is very unpleasant to take someone's life, even a murderer's life, but sometimes highly unpleasant actions are necessary to deter even worse behavior that takes the lives of innocent victims.
Þeir fátækustu fá ekki jafn góða verjendur og hinir. Þeir fá vitleysinga sem skipaðir eru af ríkinu sem er að reyna að koma þeim fyrir lás og slá (eða drepa þá). Svo sofa þessir vitleysingar í réttarsalnum og er alveg sama um "skjólstæðing sinn".
Svo er annað: Bandaríska réttarkerfið gengur út á 12 "jafningja" sem eru valdir af bæpi saksóknaranum og verjendanum til að hjálpa þeirra máli. Þ.e. mun fleiri en 12 eru fyrir og svo fá þeir neitunarvald til að taka burt þá sem gætu verið hliðhollir hinu liðinu.
Réttarkerfið gengur út á tilfinningar en ekki lög. Ef þú spilar á tilfinningar vinnuru málið.
Og svo núna þarftu ekki að fara með mál fyrir rétt með "patriot lögbótunum". Skuggalegt.
Ein spurning: Eru Patriot lögbæturnar eitthvað tengdar stríðinu gegn hryðjuverkum?
Og svona, þegar út í það er farið, hvernig virkar þetta stríð gegn hryðjuverkum? Bush hefur talað um að Bandaríkin eigi í stríði og að því megi hann beita stríðstímavaldi sem forseti. En... æ, ég á erfitt með að ná utan um þetta. Er einhvern veginn hægt að vinna þetta stríð? Og hvernig er það gert? Með því að drepa Osama Bin Laden? Þá er þetta ekki stríð gegn hryðjuverkum, heldur stríð gegn Bin Laden.
Eitt í viðbót. Ég var spurður af hverju ég hefði tekið aftökur fyrir, án þess að taka neina sérstaka afstöðu né komast að neinni niðurstöðu. Málið er, að ég var að lesa um aftökur á netinu og fannst staðreyndirnar í kring um þær athyglisverðar. Ég vildi bara vekja máls á þessu.
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