EDIT2: Molimo, you want to argue against? You can start, I'm not in the mood right now, but I'll go pro.

The FBI  Uniform Crime Reports Division publication Crime in the US for 1995 reports that there were 4.9 murders per 100,000 people in states that have abolished the death penalty, compared with 9.2 murders in those states which still have the death penalty. "In no state has the number of murders diminished after legalizing the death penalty."

(IMG:http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/SE0407-02.jpg)
Figure 2: Anscombe’s Quartet (by J. Randall Flannigan)
...

(IMG:http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/SE0407-03.jpg)
Figure 3: Executions and murder rates in the United States.
The data on capital punishment and homicide, when plotted in figure 3, look a lot like Anscombe’s fourth quartet. Most of the states had no executions at all. One state, Texas, accounts for forty of the eighty-five executions in the year shown (the patterns for other years are quite similar). An exceptional case or “outlier” of this dimension completely dominates a multiple regression analysis. Any regression study will be primarily a comparison of Texas with everywhere else. Multiple regression is simply inappropriate with this data, no matter how hard the analyst tries to force the data into a linear pattern.

Unfortunately, econometricians continue to use multiple regression on capital punishment data and to generate results that are cited in Congressional hearings.

The Ultimate Punishment: A Defense of Capital Punishment
By Earnest van den Haag

Earnest van den Haag is a retired professor of jurisprudence and public policy at Fordham University. A well-known advocate of the death penalty, van den Haag is author of Punishment Criminals and The Death Penalty: A Debate.

In an average year about 20,000 homicides occur in the United States. Fewer than 300 convicted murderers are sentenced to death. But because no more than thirty murderers have been executed in any recent year, most convicts sentenced to death are likely to die of old age. Nonetheless, the death penalty looms large in discussions: it raises important moral questions independent of the number of executions.

The death penalty is our harshest punishment. It is irrevocable: it ends the existence of those punished, instead of temporarily imprisoning them. Further, although not intended to cause physical pain, execution is the only corporal punishment still applied to adults. These singular characteristics contribute to the perennial, impassioned controversy about capital punishment.

I. Distribution

Consideration of the justice, morality, or usefulness of capital punishment is often conflated with objections to its alleged discriminatory or capricious distribution among the guilty. Wrongly so. If capital punishment is moral, no distribution would make it immoral. Improper distribution cannot affect the quality of what is distributed, be it punishments or rewards. Discriminatory or capricious distribution thus could not justify abolition of the death penalty. Further, maldistribution inheres no more in capital punishment than in any other punishment.

Maldistribution between the guilty and the innocent is, by definition, unjust. But the injustice does not lie in the nature of the punishment. Because of the finality of the death penalty, the most grievous maldistribution occurs when it is imposed upon the innocent. However, the frequent allegations of discrimination and capriciousness refer to maldistribution among the guilty and not to the punishment of the innocent.

Maldistribution of any punishment among those who deserve it is irrelevant to its justice or morality. Even if poor or black convicts guilty of capital offenses suffer capital punishment, and other convicts equally guilty of the same crimes do not, a more equal distribution, however desirable, would merely be more equal. It would not be more just to the convicts under sentence of death.

Punishments are imposed on persons, not on racial or economic groups. Guilt is personal. The only relevant question is: does the person to be executed deserve the punishment? Whether or not others who deserve the same punishment, whatever their economic or racial group, have avoided execution is irrelevant. If they have, the guilt of the executed convicts would not be diminished, nor would their punishment be less deserved. To put the issue starkly, if the death penalty were imposed on guilty blacks, but not on guilty whites, or, if it were imposed by a lottery among the guilty, this irrationally discriminatory or capricious distribution would neither make the penalty unjust, nor cause anyone to be unjustly punished, despite the undue impunity bestowed on others.

Equality, in short, seems morally less important than justice. And justice is independent of distributional inequalities. The ideal of equal justice demands that justice be equally distributed, not that it be replaced by equality. Justice requires that as many of the guilty as possible be punished, regardless of whether others have avoided punishment. To let these others escape the deserved punishment does not do justice to them, or to society. But it is not unjust to those who could not escape. …

Recent data reveal little direct racial discrimination in the sentencing of those arrested and convicted of murder. The abrogation of the death penalty for rape has eliminated a major source of racial discrimination. Concededly, some discrimination based on race of murder victims may exist; yet, this discrimination affects criminal victimizers in an unexpected way. Murderers of whites are thought more likely to be executed than murderers of blacks. Black victims, then, are less fully vindicated than white ones. However, because most black murderers kill blacks, black murderers are spared the death penalty more often than are white murderers. They fare better than most white murderers. The motivation behind unequal distribution of the death penalty may well have been to discriminate against blacks, but the result has favored them. Maldistribution is thus a straw man for empirical as well as analytical reasons.


II. Miscarriages of Justice

In a recent survey Professors Hugo Adam Bedau and Michael Radelet found that 7000 persons were executed in the United States between 1900 and 1985 and that 25 were innocent of capital crimes. Among the innocents they list Sacco and Vanzetti as well as Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. Although their data may be questionable, I do not doubt that, over a long enough period, miscarriages of justice will occur even in capital cases.

Despite precautions, nearly all human activities, such as trucking, lighting, or construction, cost the lives of some innocent bystanders. We do not give up these activities, because the advantages, moral or material, outweigh the unintended losses. Analogously, for those who think the death penalty just, miscarriages of justice are offset by the moral benefits and the usefulness of doing justice. For those who think the death penalty unjust even when it does not miscarry, miscarriages can hardly be decisive.

III. Deterrence

Despite much recent work, there has been no conclusive statistical demonstration that the death penalty is a better deterrent than are alternative punishments. However, deterrence is less than decisive for either side. Most abolitionists acknowledge that they would continue to favor abolition even if the death penalty were shown to deter more murders than alternatives could deter. Abolitionists appear to value the life of a convicted murderer or, at least, his non-execution, more highly than they value the lives of innocent victims who might be spared by deterring prospective murderers.

Deterrence is not altogether decisive for me either. I would favor retention of the death penalty as retribution even if it were shown that the threat of execution could not deter prospective murderers not already deterred by the threat of imprisonment. Still, I believe the death penalty, because of its finality, is more feared than imprisonment, and deters some prospective murderers not deterred by the threat of imprisonment. Sparing the lives of even a few prospective victims by deterring their murderers is more important than preserving the lives of convicted murderers because of the possibility, or even the probability, that executing them would not deter others. Whereas the lives of the victims who might be saved are valuable, that of the murderer has only negative value, because of his crime. Surely the criminal law is meant to protect the lives of potential victims in preference to those of actual murderers.

Murder rates are determined by many factors; neither the severity nor the probability of the threatened sanction is always decisive. However, for the long run, I share the view of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen: “Some men, probably, abstain from murder because they fear that if they committed murder they would be hanged. Hundreds of thousands abstain from it because they regard it with horror. One great reason they regard it with horror is that murderers are hanged.” Penal sanctions are useful in the long run for the formation of the internal restraints so necessary to control crime. The severity and finality of the death penalty is appropriate to the seriousness and finality of murder.

IV. Incidental Issues: Cost, Relative Suffering, Brutalization

Many nondecisive issues are associated with capital punishment. Some believe that the monetary cost of appealing a capital sentence is excessive. Yet most comparisons of the cost of life imprisonment with the cost of execution, apart from their dubious relevance, are flawed at least by the implied assumption that life prisoners will generate no judicial costs during their imprisonment. At any rate, the actual monetary costs are trumped by the importance of doing justice.

Others insist that a person sentenced to death suffers more than his victim suffered, and that this (excess) suffering is undue according to the lex talionis (rule of retaliation). We cannot know whether the murderer on death row suffers more than his victim suffered; however, unlike the murderer, the victim deserved none of the suffering inflicted. Further, the limitations of the lex talionis were meant to restrain private vengeance, not the social retribution that has taken its place. Punishment—regardless of the motivation—is not intended to revenge, offset, or compensate for the victim’s suffering, or to be measured by it. Punishment is to vindicate the law and the social order undermined by the crime. This is why a kidnapper’s penal confinement is not limited to the period for which he imprisoned his victim; nor is a burglar’s confinement meant merely to offset the suffering or the harm he caused his victim; nor is it meant only to offset the advantage gained.

Another argument heard at least since Beccaria is that, by killing a murderer, we encourage, endorse, or legitimize unlawful killing. Yet, although all punishments are meant to be unpleasant, it is seldom argued that they legitimize the unlawful imposition of identical unpleasantness. Imprisonment is not thought to legitimize kidnapping; neither are fines thought to legitimize robbery. The difference between murder and execution, or between kidnapping and imprisonment, is that the first is unlawful and undeserved, the second a lawful and deserved punishment for an unlawful act. The physical similarities of the punishment to the crime are irrelevant. The relevant difference is not physical, but social.

V. Justice, Excess, Degradation

We threaten punishments in order to deter crime. We impose them not only to make the threats credible but also as retribution (justice) for the crimes that were not deterred. Threats an punishments are necessary to deter and deterrence is a sufficient practical justification for them. Retribution is an independent moral justification. Although penalties can be unwise, repulsive, or inappropriate, and those punished can be pitiable, in a sense the infliction of legal punishment on a guilty person cannot be unjust. By committing the crime, the criminal volunteered to assume the risk of receiving a legal punishment that he could have avoided by not committing the crime. The punishment he suffers is the punishment he voluntarily risked suffering and, therefore, it is no more unjust to him than any other event for which one knowingly volunteers to assume the risk. Thus, the death penalty cannot be unjust to the guilty criminal.

There remain, however, two moral objections. The penalty may be regarded as always excessive as retribution and always morally degrading. To regard the death penalty as always excessive, one must believe that no crime—no matter how heinous—could possibly justify capital punishment. Such is a belief that can neither be corroborated nor refuted; it is an article of faith.

Alternatively, or concurrently, one may believe that everybody, the murderer no less than the victim, has an imprescriptible (natural?) right to life. The law therefore should not deprive anyone of life. I share Jeremy Bentham’s view that any such “natural and imprescriptible rights” are “nonsense upon stilts.”

Justice Brennan has insisted that the death penalty is “uncivilized,” “inhuman,” inconsistent with “human dignity” and with “the sanctity of life,” that it “treats members of the human race as non-humans, as objects to be toyed with and discarded,” that it is “uniquely degrading to human dignity” and “by its very nature, [involves] a denial of the executed person’s humanity.” Justice Brennan does not say why he thinks execution “uncivilized.” Hitherto most civilizations have had the death penalty, although it has been discarded in Western Europe, where it is currently unfashionable probably because of its abuse by totalitarian regimes.

By “degrading,” Justice Brennan seems to mean that execution degrades the executed convicts. Yet philosophers, such as Immanuel Kant and G. F. W. Hegel, have insisted that, when deserved, execution, far from degrading the executed convict affirms his humanity by affirming his rationality and his responsibility for his actions. They thought that execution, when deserved, is required for the sake of the convict’s dignity. (Does not life imprisonment violate human dignity more than execution, by keeping alive a prisoner deprived of all autonomy?)

Common sense indicates that it cannot be death—our common fate—that is inhuman. Therefore, Justice Brennan must mean that death degrades when it comes not as a natural or accidental event, but as a deliberate social imposition. The murderer learns through his punishment that his fellow men have found him unworthy of living; that because he has murdered, his is being expelled from the community of the living. This degradation is self-inflicted. By murdering, the murderer has so dehumanized himself that he cannot remain among the living. The social recognition of his self-degradation is the punitive essence of execution. To believe, as Justice Brennan appears to, that the degradation is inflicted by the execution reverses the direction of causality.

Execution of those who have committed heinous murders may deter only one murder per year. If it does, it seems quite warranted. It is also the only fitting retribution for murder I can think of.

Basically, I'm going to argue that Justice as a concept is best served by the death penalty, that the convict has forfeited the right to life, and that the permanent removal of a dangerous murderer from society can only be achieved through capital punishment, thus it is the safest model for the innocent.

III.  Deterrence. This section presents no evidence that anyone out there has been stopped from murdering someone else because they feared the death penalty more than life without parole, much less proved that enough people have been deterred to make it worth the innocent executions.

V. This paragraph assumes that the justice system is partially intended to punish the murderer. I believe that the writer should have listened to his parents when they told him that "two wrongs don't make a right." Killing a murderer will do nothing to bring the victim back to life. While we need a justice system to provide a disincentive to commit crimes, its purpose should not be confused with revenge.

II: Miscarriages of Justice. Not much to say; it's up to the essay writer to persuade me that the death penalty is worth the innocent people that are executed, and they haven't.

You did not understand the point being made, then. The point was that deterrance is created through the societal influences of viewing murder in a horrible light. No one will be deterred and think "well, I shouldn't kill him because my punishment will be xxx" -- deterrance works by preventing even the thought of "I wonder what it would be like if I killed him" from entering someone's mind. It is because we treat murder as a horrible crime, which is in large part reinforced through execution, that effects are made.

Further, lets look at the graph you gave up there. Firstly, lets account for cultural or economic status, and lump "north" and "south" as general regions that should be compared: I think most of us will agree that the culture in the Democratic northeast is quite different from the Southern Republican Stronghold?

http://www.prisonpolicy.org/atlas/executions2003.shtml
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?scid=12&did;=169
The second site is anti-DP: they skew facts by only highlighting those who have completly abolished all legal option of DP.

Lets see what we can determine from quickly compiling our information.

The murder rates chart shows that in general, southern states have higher murder rates than northern ones.

Now, when we look at specifically which states had the highest murder rates, we see that the top 5 states on the murder rates chart did not execute a single person. Indeed, the number one and number three states are Louisiana and Mississippi respectively, deep south states with no DP.

Now, even beyond proof, even if we can't prove specifically that executions will deter a single person, such a thing should be given the benefit of the doubt unless proven completely false. The life of a single innocent is infinitely more valuable than that of a murderer. If even one innocent life is saved through deterrance, the execution of ten of the lowest fiends would be a fitting price for such. This is because the convicted murderer gives up all of his worth to society. I cannot possibly believe that the concept of keeping people locked in cages is worth the sacrifice of innocent lives.

The reason he is arguing that about the justice system is simple: an examination of the justice system currently in place shows that the emphasis is indeed upon retribution. As a professor of jurisprudence and a legal scholor, he knows this. This focus is why if someone robs my house I do not get the right to say "You cannot prosecute him, I refuse to press charges." Society as a whole is exacting the justified punishment of the crime committed. It has nothing to do with individual revenge, and everything to do with the Just Deserts of crime. This is not revenge. Restitution ("making things right") and restorative justice are very minor roles, generally reserved for graffiti artists and vandals; the purpose of the justice system in regards to all violent criminals is, and should remain always, 1) separating the offenders from society for the safety of all, and 2) punishment for wrongful acts. "Three strikes" laws are an excellent example of these principles: they are wildly popular, despite some flaws in distribution, because of their appeal to common justice.

You may say that "two wrongs don't make a right" all you want. But separating murderers permanently from society is not a wrong. It is not even a "right" (sorry, no way around that pun) given to society.

This can be done perfectly well without the death penalty.

I don't see how that's skewing facts.

Um, what? Louisiana and Mississippi both have a Death Penalty, and use it rather extensively. There are 164 people on death row in those two states. They executed three people in 2002.

You're ignoring the fact that innocent people are executed. The death penalty kills innocent people as well as murderers.

There is a difference between providing a disincentive to murder and taking revenge on the murderer. I don't care how the current justice system is set up, it should not be intended to get revenge for the victims.

There are other ways to separate murderers from society.

All those states are neighbouring each other (and therefore will have similar cultures), and one of them has the Death Penalty and the other does not. Where's the deterrence?

I strongly disagree. There's literally no way to substitute "You fuck up, you're fucking toast. Period." as a message through any method other than death.

It gives the false impression that states which de facto abolished the death penalty-- as in it is no longer considered during sentencing, but is still legal by the letter of the law-- are activly executing people. It would be deceptive to say that Illinios is executing people, but that's what it looks like from the chart they give.

"rather extesnsivly" is not an average of less than three per year. In any case, correct, I misspoke, but the fact remains, comparing the number of executions in states in the south with the murder rate shows that the highest murder rates are found where the least amount of executions occur. No in depth "statistical analysis" (AKA bullshit number manipulation) needed.

Hooo boy, here's the crux of the debate in such a short little blip.

1) It's not straight up "revenge." It's a combination of, restitution, retribution, incapacitation, and justice in general. Indeed, of the four primary principles upon which a punishment can be based, the death penalty fullfills three, despite nearly any other punishment method being limited to one or two.

2) You argue from emotion rather than logic. What is wrong with affording revenge in such a case? The murderer has no use to society. He is scum. Eliminating him can cause no harm, but can on the other hand lesson pain.

3) Why do you think that victems should be victems twice? Once to the murderer, and again to an unjust state?

We speak of a different society, in this case at least. I shall clarify my wording. I refer to the society of humans in general, you speak of free humans.

I don't think that prison guards, prison nurses, other prisoners, anyone who may be victem if the person escapes from prison, or any human being in general deserves the risk of leaving these people in jail. What does a person given life without parole have to lose? Not a whole lot. "Say, you, new guy, suck my dick or I'll kill you. HAHA, yeah, right, tell the guards and I'll kill you. You think I've got a problem with killing you? They can't punish me any worse." It's happened before.

Invalid conclusion. Missouri: 31.36 people/KM^2, Iowa: 20.22 people/KM^2.  Large cities such as St. Luis tend to throw things off as well. In short, though culture may be the similar, the geography clearly isn't.