Article 2: Does Death Penalty Save Lives? A New Debate

Source Citation:

Liptak, Adam. "Does Death Penalty Save Lives? A New Debate." New York Times 18
Nov. 2007: n. pag. Web. 30 Mar. 2010. .

This was the first article that I found when my question had previously been, "Why is the death penalty still around?" The article starts by questioning whether the death penalty deters murders. According to about a dozen recent studies, the executions save lives. However, the "death penalty 'is applied so rarely that the number of homicides it can plausibly have caused or deterred cannot reliably be disentangled from the large year-to-year changes in the homicide rate caused by other factors,' John J. Donohue III, a law professor at Yale...wrote" (Liptak). In simple words, I interpreted this to mean that the evidence for determining whether the death penalty has a deterrent effect or not is unstable; conclusions can't be blindly drawn from that little statistic. I'll admit, I was kind of upset when it said the death penalty is deterring murders because I detest capital punishment, but seeing that refuted made me feel a bit better. The bottom line of this article is, it's difficult to tell whether the death penalty discourages murder or not, so getting rid of it would be a decision made based on little evidence supporting it either way. My bottom line is, if we can't tell if the death penalty is working or not, why kill more people just for our experiments? Rehabilitation is the way to go.