More Executions, Fewer Murders

by Earl P. Holt III — Dylann Roof has been sentenced to die for the mass murders he committed in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015.

It is almost like a Shakespearean Tragedy that anyone so perceptive about media bias could be so confused about how to fight it: Yet, by murdering innocent victims, Roof’s misguided actions will lead inevitably to his own destruction.

However, there is a silver lining to this dark cloud: In light of the high profile nature of his trial and the likelihood of his eventual execution, it is absolutely certain that other potential murderers will be deterred as a consequence, saving the lives of many innocent victims.

If this statement happens to run counter to what you’ve always been told or taught, you can credit a massive disinformation campaign by Marxists in academia and the Corrupt Leftist Media for perpetuating a 60 year-old lie.

LEFTIST “SCIENCE”

The quaint notion that capital punishment is not an effective general deterrent to murder came as a result of some very flawed research done in the late 1950s by a leftist Sociologist named Thorsten Sellin. (T. Sellin. The Death Penalty. American Law Institute, Philadelphia. 1959.)

As often occurs in these endeavors, objective truth was sacrificed to the “loftier” goals of ideology: That is, Sellin candidly acknowledged that he set out to “prove” that capital punishment did not deter the crime of murder in the U.S., and his bias was immediately evident in his results.

Sellin’s “methodology” compared murder rates in American states with capital punishment statutes “on their books,” against murder rates in states without capital punishment statutes of any kind. Using a simple-minded correlation technique, he found no significant difference between these two categories of states.

The flaw in his methodology consisted of the fact that many states with capital punishment statutes “on their books” never actually used them, and some – including several in New England — had not carried out an execution for 50 years or more at the time of his study.

This created a fraudulent dichotomy between these two categories of states, and obscured any deterrent effect that might have been in evidence.

Predictably, leftists in academia and the news media seized upon and perpetuated Sellin’s erroneous conclusions, thus ensuring that the public has remained egregiously misinformed about the deterrent effect of capital punishment for almost 60 years.

EHRLICH TO THE RESCUE

Those who value objective truth and good government are forever indebted to an economist named Isaac Ehrlich, who re-examined the deterrent effect of capital punishment following the Supreme Court’s decision in Furman v. Georgia (1972,) which instituted a “moratorium” on executions in the United States.

In a more elegant and sophisticated design than that of Sellin, Ehrlich’s model created three categories of states: First, states that have capital punishment statutes and which actually use them; Second, states which have capital punishment statutes but never used them; And, third, states which do not have capital punishment statutes of any kind.

Using a far more sophisticated Simultaneous Equation-Multivariate-Regression Analysis, Ehrlich found that the application of capital punishment has a demonstrable and powerful general deterrent effect upon the crime of murder.

In fact, Ehrlich found that for every person executed for the crime of murder in the United States, it saved the lives of between seven and eight innocent victims. (I. Ehrlich. “The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment.” American Economic Review, June of 1975.)

Interestingly, Ehrlich’s later use of identical methodologies to study the incidence of other, non-capital crimes, generated little controversy within legal and “scientific” circles: This proves that the real opposition to his capital punishment research was political and ideological in nature, rather than scientific.

IDEOLOGY TRUMPS SCIENCE

Predictably, the left immediately set out to try to prove Ehrlich wrong. Having recently succeeded in convincing the Supreme Court to place a moratorium on executions in Furman, the Cultural Marxists put on a full-court press: They weren’t about to allow Ehrlich’s research to go unanswered, especially when it demonstrated a powerful rationale for executions.

In a hastily written rebuttal in the Yale Law Journal, a leftist Iowa Law Professor and his accomplice attacked Ehrlich for not holding constant certain unrelated (or “exogenous”) variables in his study. (D. Baldus and J. Cole. “A Comparison of the Work of Thorstein Sellin and Isaac Ehrlich on the Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment.” Yale Law Journal, Vol 85, No 2, Dec. of 1975.)

Confronted with such ignorance and phony “scholarship,” Ehrlich was gracious, but did respond with the following: “This error by Baldus and Cole betrays quite a fundamental misunderstanding of the methodology which they have undertaken to evaluate.” I. Ehrlich. “The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment:Reply.” American Economic Review. Vol. 67, June of 1977.)

Such ideological opponents of capital punishment work in consort with their allies in the legal profession, who doggedly undermine the deterrent effect of capital punishment by dragging-out the appeals process – sometimes for as long as 20 years — so that many executions are too far removed in time and memory to retain their full deterrent effect.

These “abolitionists” then turn around and employ the length and expense of the appeals process – for which THEY are singularly responsible — as an argument against capital punishment, contending that such lengthy appeals have made Capital Punishment too expensive to retain…!

BETTER TECHNIQUES

A new and more sophisticated analytical technique called “Panel Data-Sets” has been developed, which appears very promising, and has allowed researchers to eliminate many earlier methodological errors that plagued all such studies, including Ehrlich’s.

Several recent studies employing these panel data-sets have demonstrated a stunning vindication of Isaac Ehrlich’s original research, and many show an even greater deterrent effect from capital punishment than that first demonstrated by Ehrlich in his pioneering study in 1975.

Hence, two Emory University researchers found that each U.S. execution for the crime of murder saved the lives of 18 innocent victims, by virtue of its general deterrent effect. (H. Dezhbakhsh and J. Shepherd. “The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment.” Economic Inquiry, Vol 44, July of 2006.)

Likewise, two University of Houston researchers found that the 13-month Texas Death Penalty “moratorium” (Jan. 1996 to Feb. 1997) precipitated the murder of 90 additional victims, whereas re-instituting executions “significantly” reduced the Texas murder rate. (D. Cloninger and R. Marchesini. “Execution Moratorium is No Holiday for Homicides.” 35 Applied Economics 569 — 2001.)

Paul Zimmerman, a former Reagan Administration Economist, found that each execution spared the lives of 14 innocent victims as a result of capital punishment’s deterrent effect. (P. Zimmerman. “State Executions, Deterrence, and the Incidence of Murder.” Journal of Applied Economics, Vol. VII, May of 2004.)

CONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE

In his review of the most recent studies on the deterrent effect of capital punishment for the Senate Judiciary Committee on February 1, 2006, former Reagan Economic Advisor Paul Rubin summarized his interpretation of the literature in this manner:

“The literature is easy to summarize: Almost all modern studies and all the refereed studies find a significant deterrent effect of capital punishment. …To an economist, this is not surprising: We expect criminals and potential criminals to respond to sanctions, and execution is the most severe sanction available.”

There is an old adage bemoaning the fact that “A lie is half-way around the world before the truth can get its boots on…” This is particularly true in the Social Sciences, which have been largely subverted by Cultural Marxists in the course of their “long march through the institutions,’ as coined by student activist Rudi Dutschke, 1972.

However, if there is one lesson to be gleaned from the debate surrounding capital punishment – beyond its deterrent effect — it is that one man truly can make a difference.

This is especially true if that man – like Isaac Ehrlich — possesses greater courage, vision and integrity than an army of his enemies among the Marxist ideologues that currently dominate academia… (END