Death Penalty Laws and Murder Rates: Evidence from Synthetic Controls

First published: September 13, 2021 https://doi.org/10.1111/jels.12291

Commentary

While the public debate over the death penalty in the United States seems to have long focused on the presumptive deterrent effect of punishment, many scholars have sought to determine (1) whether the penalty actually prevents murder and (2) the number of murders it prevents

I would argue that we have been trying to do this.

However, a fairly homogeneous set of methodological techniques was deployed in these efforts.

This study breaks with that tradition by using comprehensive controls to assess the deterrence of the death penalty.

Using seven states that have recently abolished the death penalty and 29 states that retained the penalty at the same time, the study shows that applying this method does not find evidence that the presence of death penalty laws in a state is sufficient to deter murder.

This result is robust to a number of alternative specifications.

They were stated to persist even when I used stranger homicide (theoretically susceptible to deterrence) as the dependent variable.