Society has always used punishment to discourage would-be criminals from unlawful action.
Since society has the highest interest in preventing murder, it should use the strongest
punishment available to deter murder, and that is the death penalty. If murderers are sentenced to
death and executed, potential murderers will think twice before killing for fear of losing their
own life.
For years, criminologists analyzed murder rates to see if they fluctuated with the likelihood of
convicted murderers being executed, but the results were inconclusive. Then in 1973 Isaac
Ehrlich employed a new kind of analysis which produced results showing that for every inmate
who was executed, 7 lives were spared because others were deterred from committing murder.
Similar results have been produced by disciples of Ehrlich in follow-up studies.
Moreover, even if some studies regarding deterrence are inconclusive, that is only because the
death penalty is rarely used and takes years before an execution is actually carried out.
Punishments which are swift and sure are the best deterrent. The fact that some states or
countries which do not use the death penalty have lower murder rates than jurisdictions which do
is not evidence of the failure of deterrence. States with high murder rates would have even higher
rates if they did not use the death penalty.
Ernest van den Haag, a Professor of Jurisprudence at Fordham University who has studied the
question of deterrence closely, wrote: "Even though statistical demonstrations are not conclusive,
and perhaps cannot be, capital punishment is likely to deter more than other punishments
because people fear death more than anything else. They fear most death deliberately inflicted by
law and scheduled by the courts. Whatever people fear most is likely to deter most. Hence, the
threat of the death penalty may deter some murderers who otherwise might not have been
deterred. And surely the death penalty is the only penalty that could deter prisoners already
serving a life sentence and tempted to kill a guard, or offenders about to be arrested and facing a
life sentence. Perhaps they will not be deterred. But they would certainly not be deterred by
anything else. We owe all the protection we can give to law enforcers exposed to special risks."
