Diary: Death Penalty Does Not Deter Murder, According to New Survey of America's Leading Criminologists

Eighty-eight percent of the country's top criminologists do not believe the death penalty acts as a deterrent to homicide, according to a new study published recently in Northwestern University School of Law's Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology authored by Professor Michael
Radelet, Chair of the Department of Sociology at the University of Colorado-Boulder, and Traci
Lacock, an attorney and Sociology graduate student in Boulder.

Coming on the heels of New Mexico's abolition of the death penalty and amid a national trend
away from capital punishment because of concerns about its high costs, executing the innocent, unfairness in application, failure to provide "closure" for victims, and other issues, the study entitled "Do Executions Lower Homicide Rates? The Views of Leading Criminologists" undermines deterrence as a rationale for maintaining the punishment.
Eighty-seven percent of the expert criminologists believe that abolition of the death penalty
would not have any significant effect on murder rates. In addition, 75 percent of the respondents
agree that "debates about the death penalty distract Congress and state legislatures from focusing on real solutions to crime problems."

The survey relied on questionnaires completed by the most pre-eminent criminologists in the
country, including: Fellows in the American Society of Criminology; winners of the American
Society of Criminology's prestigious Southerland Award; and recent presidents of the American
Society of Criminology. The American Society of Criminology is the top professional
organization of criminologists in the world.

Respondents were not asked for their personal
opinion about the wisdom of the death penalty, but instead to answer the questions only on the
basis of their understandings of the empirical research.

The study concludes: "Our survey indicates that the vast majority of the world's top
criminologists believe that the empirical research has revealed the deterrence hypothesis for a
myth ... [T]he consensus among criminologists is that the death penalty does not add any
significant deterrent effect above that of long-term imprisonment."