Tennessee Death Penalty Fact Sheet
Deterrence and Recidivism
The concept of deterrence emerges from rational choice models used to explain human behavior. However, murder is most often a crime of passion. People who kill are rarely rational at the time of the crime.
Killers assume they will not be caught, so they are not deterred by fear of the death penalty. The threat of execution at some future date is unlikely to enter the minds of killers acting under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol, in the grip of fear or rage, panicking while committing another crime (such as robbery), or suffering from mental illness or retardation and therefore not understanding the gravity of their crime.
Almost every state now uses a lengthy guaranteed minimum sentence before parole can even be considered, and 48 states have a life without the possibility of parole sentence, including Tennessee. An individual with a life sentence in Tennessee must serve 51 years before becoming eligible for parole. After Indiana, Georgia, and Virginia provided for life without parole in capital murder cases and juries were informed of the alternative, fewer death verdicts have occurred.
In 2006, the murder rate (per 100,000 people) in death penalty states was 5.9, in non-death penalty states it was 4.22, a 40% difference.
In 2006, the murder rate (per 100,000 people) in the South which accounts for 82% of all executions was 6.8; the national average was 5.7, a 20% difference.
According to statistics from the latest FBI Uniform Crime Report, regions of the country that use the death penalty the least are the safest for police officers. Police are most in danger in the South.
The Geography of Executions: The Capital Punishment Quagmire in America. Authors Keith Harries and Derral Cheatwood studied differences in homicides in 293 counties that were paired based on factors such as geographic location and demographic and economic variables. The pairs shared a contiguous border, but differed on use of capital punishment. While the authors found no support for a deterrent effect, they did find higher violence crime rates in death penalty counties. *(Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, MD. 1997)
Recent Deterrence Studies
There have been recent studies claiming that the death penalty does deter murder and that executions save a calculable number of lives. There was a strong response to the studies:
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Dr. Jeffrey A. Fagan (Columbia University) takes issue with this lack of serious and adequate peer review by fellow researchers. He analyzed this research and found that ???this work fails the test of rigorous replication and robustness analysis that are the hallmarks of good science.??? (4 Ohio State Journal of Criminal Law 255 (2006))
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Robert Weisberg (Stanford University???s School of Law) notes that many of the new studies claiming to find that the death penalty deters murder have been legitimately criticized for omitting key variables and for not addressing the potential distorting effect of one high-executing state, Texas. (1 Annual Review of Law and Social Science 151 (2005))
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The authors conclude that the estimates claiming that the death penalty saves numerous lives ???are simply not credible.??? Authors state that using the same data and proper methodology could lead to the exact opposite conclusion: that is, that the death penalty actually increases the number of murders. The authors state: ???We show that with the most minor tweaking of the [research] instruments, one can get estimates ranging from 429 lives saved per execution to 86 lives lost. These numbers are outside the bounds of credibility.??? (The Economists??? Voice, April 2006)
