Death Penalty Deters Recidivism

Robert Amos was sentenced in 1981 to 15 years to life for murder. In 2000, despite the fact that he had a record of violence while in prison, Amos won parole. Right now he's on trial for another murder, that of 24 year-old college student Alyssa Heberton-Morimoto in Colorado. Amos has told the judge he hopes to receive the death penalty because it's the only way he will stop his violence. He has been quoted as saying: "A life sentence is a free license to kill."

Economist Naci Mocan professor at the University of Colorado at Denver co-authored a studies in 2003 and 2006, both of which concluded that each execution saves the lives of five people. Commuting a sentence has just the opposite effect. Five more die.

"The results are robust, they don't really go away," Naci is quoted as telling Robert Tanner of the Associated Press. "I oppose the death penalty. But my results show that the death penalty (deters)-what am I going to do, hide them?"

Mocan's studies have been concerned with demonstrating the deterrent effect of the death penalty, which we have been told by opponents, is non-existent.

What ever you believe, however, almost anyone would agree that dead men don't go on to kill again. This is a point in the debate that seems to have gone pretty much unnoticed. Most people assume that when someone is sent away for murder they will never see the outside of a prison again. This isn't the case.

Death penalty opponents have made some points in recent years with the exoneration of a number of men sentenced to die for crimes they didn't commit. These cases are proof that we need to look at how our justice system is failing. More than anything these cases are examples of what can happen if you're poor and wrongly accused of a crime. What they do not prove, however, is that the death penalty is unwarranted.

According to a Department of Justice study released in 2001, eight percent of those who were sentenced to death had been convicted of a previous homicide. Actual time served by inmates with life sentences is hard to pin down, because some states don't keep track, while others mandate that life means life.

A report released in 2004 titled "The Meaning of Life: Long Prison Sentences in Context," put the average time served on a life sentence at about 29 years, but counted into that figure were inmates in states that have truth in sentencing laws. So, depending on which state you commit murder in, you might be out in significantly less time than 29 years.

It's hard to imagine anything worse than having someone you love murdered. But imagine finding out that the person who murdered your mother, sister, child, had been convicted of murder before and given a life sentence only to be released by a parole board or judge who decided this killer was reformed.

If carrying out the death penalty on an innocent person is a travesty, and it is, then what is sacrificing the life of an innocent person so that a convicted killer can have another chance? The one function that putting convicted killers to death inarguably serves is that it removes the possibility that some well-meaning person will release a murderer to kill again.

The case is best put by death penalty opponent Cass Sunstein, in an Associated Press interview: "If it's the case that executing murderers prevents the execution of innocents by murderers, then the moral evaluation is not simple. Abolitionists or others, like me, who are skeptical about the death penalty haven't given adequate consideration to the possibility that innocent life is saved by the death penalty."

Sunstein was referring here to the deterrent effect, but that issue has nothing to do with the larger point that when you kill a rabid dog it can't harm anyone else. The death penalty removes forever the possibility of recidivism.

Attention focused case of Jack Henry Abbot, who was sprung from prison by Norman Mailer, only to stab to death a waiter in a crowded restaurant, belies how common the phenomenon is.

If eight percent of people charged with murder had previous convictions for murder then of the more than 16,000 murders in 2005 cited by the Uniform Crime Report for that year, over a thousand people may have been killed by repeat murderers. Of course, the method for arriving at this number is unscientific in the extreme, but these numbers are disturbing nonetheless.

The death penalty protects the public from the most heinous criminals and it also protects us from psychiatrists, judges, parole boards, and celebrities who can too easily be hoodwinked by a practiced con-man determined to win his freedom in order to continue his criminal career.

Had Robert Amos been sentenced to die for his first murder, a crime he doesn't deny committing, Alyssa Heberton-Morimoto. Amos would have been deterred from killing her.

Source:http://www.foxnews.com/wires/2007Jun11/0,4670,DeathPenaltyDeterrence,00.html