Does Death Penalty Save Lives? A New Debate

“Capital punishment may well save lives,” the two professors continued. “Those who object to capital punishment, and who do so in the name of protecting life, must come to terms with the possibility that the failure to inflict capital punishment will fail to protect life.”

For the first time in a generation, the question of whether the death penalty deters murders has captured the attention of scholars in law and economics, setting off an intense new debate about one of the central justifications for capital punishment.
By ADAM LIPTAK

According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented.
The effect is most pronounced, according to some studies, in Texas and other states that execute condemned inmates relatively often and relatively quickly.

The studies, performed by economists in the past decade, compare the number of executions in different jurisdictions with homicide rates over time — while trying to eliminate the effects of crime rates, conviction rates and other factors — and say that murder rates tend to fall as executions rise. One influential study looked at 3,054 counties over two decades.

“I personally am opposed to the death penalty,” said H. Naci Mocan, an economist at Louisiana State University and an author of a study finding that each execution saves five lives. “But my research shows that there is a deterrent effect.”

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NVDL: I've often heard experts and leaders saying that research shows the death penalty doesn't work. I never believed them. In a perfect society you wouldn't need an imperfect solution like this. We're far from an ideal world, and we're incredibly stupid if we think - in South Africa especially - that we live in one. It's an obscene irony that in our idealised effort to protect human rights, we allow 40 murders to be perpetrated each day.

If you had a child, and every day he killed a different neighbours dog, but all you did was send him to his room, surely as some point you would think of giving (yes, even your own child) a damn good hiding. It's not nice, but it's also not nice for the 14 600 dead people (that's half a stadium or 14 schools).