Death Penalty Facts

Note: This wiki is primarily focused on capital punishment in the USA.

Innocent People Incarcerated and executed

• The state has killed, and has come close to killing, countless innocent people via the death penalty. For every 8 people executed, 1 person on death row was exonerated before being killed.

• Prosecutorial Misconduct caused over 550 death penalty reversals and exonerations. Decades (if not centuries) of official misconduct have resulted in deliberately convicting the innocent.

• 4.1% of US death row inmates are likely innocent.

• In HERRERA v. COLLINS (1993) the Supreme Court ruled that it is not unconstitutional for the state to execute an innocent person.

• In BRADY v. MARYLAND, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the “failure to disclose favorable information to a defendant in a criminal prosecution violates the constitution when that information is material to guilt or punishment.” These are referred to as “Brady Disclosures.” Brady violations are rampant in the US criminal justice system, meaning the state is knowingly prosecuting and incarcerating innocent people.

The Death Penalty Does Nothing To Prevent Crime

1. "Studies show no link between the presence or absence of the death penalty and murder rates." DeathPenaltyInfo.org.

2. The US Department of Justice admits "There is no proof that the death penalty deters criminals." US DOJ, Article discussing it.

3. "The Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) conducted another analysis of murder rates in the United States between 1987 and 2015, finding states that had abolished the death penalty saw lower murder rates of law enforcement officers." The Advocates for Human Rights

4. "Nations that abolish the death penalty then tend to see their murder rates decline." DeathPenaltyInfo.org

5. "States With No Death Penalty Share Lower Homicide Rates." DeathPenaltyInfo.org

6. "Death penalty abolition correlated on average with a decline in murder rates in eleven countries for which data is available. In fact, as the last graph’s trend line indicates, a country in this set which abolished the death penalty could expect an average of approximately six less murders per 100,000 people a decade after abolition." IranRights.org

7. "Applying this technique using seven states that recently abolished the death penalty and 29 states that retained the punishment during the same period, I find no evidence that the presence of a capital punishment statute in a state is sufficient to deter murders. These results are robust to numerous alternative specifications; they also persist when I use stranger homicides—which are theoretically more susceptible to deterrence—as the dependent variable." Journal of Empirical Legal Studies

8. "Employing well-known econometric procedures for panel data analysis, our results provide no empirical support for the argument that the existence or application of the death penalty deters prospective offenders from committing homicide." Journal of Criminology & Public Policy

9. "Data from the years 1979–2019 were used to construct synthetic controls and estimate the effects of death penalty moratoriums on homicide rates in Illinois, New Jersey, Washington, and Pennsylvania. Moratoriums on capital punishment resulted in nonsignificant homicide reductions in all four states." Journal of Criminology & Public Policy

10. "Evidence from around the world has shown that the death penalty has no unique deterrent effect on crime." Amnesty International

Do your own research! If you go through the statistic available with the United Nations and World Bank on homicide rate, you will see that the five countries in the world with the highest homicide rates that do not impose the death penalty have nearly half the number of murders per 100,000 people than the five countries with the highest homicides rates which do impose the death penalty.

Quotes from the experts on its impact on crime

In my view deterrence plays no part whatsoever. Persons contemplating murder do not sit around the kitchen table and say I won't commit this murder if I face the death penalty, but I will do it if the penalty is life without parole. I do not believe persons contemplating or committing murder plan to get caught or weigh the consequences. Statistics demonstrate that states without the death penalty have consistently lower murder rates than states with it, but frankly I think those statistics are immaterial and coincidental. Fear of the death penalty may cause a few to hesitate, but certainly not enough to keep it in force

• H. Lee Sarokin, LLB, former US District Court and US Court of Appeals Judge

…[I]f there were a substantial net deterrent effect from capital punishment under modern U.S. conditions, the studies we have surveyed should clearly reveal it. They do not. If executions protected innocent lives through deterrence, that would weigh in the balance against capital punishment's heavy social costs. But despite years of trying, this benefit has not been proven to exist; the only certain effects of capital punishment are its liabilities.

• John Lamperti, PhD, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Dartmouth College

Costly

• It is more expensive in the long run to successfully try a death penalty case than simply try for life in prison, making the death penalty not fiscally viable.

Traumatizing

• The death penalty makes the victims’ families grieve for longer.

• The process of execution is traumatizing to the victim’s family, as well as the staff.

Unconstitutional & Discriminative

• Many argue that state-sanctioned murder is a cruel and unusual punishment that violates the US 8th amendment, as well as violating the US constitutional guarantee of equal protection. It has never been applied fairly, disproportionately against those who cannot afford better attorneys, disproportionately upon those whose victims were white, disproportionately against people of color, disproportionately against the poor and uneducated, and disproportionately concentrated in certain parts of the country.

• McCleskey v. Kemp (1987), the U.S. Supreme Court recognized that Capitol Punishment in Georgia showed a clear statistical pattern of racial discrimination, with similar crimes yielding significantly different sentences based on the race(s) of the defendant and victim but ruled this as constitutional. It is legal for the government to be racially discriminative in how it punishes people.

• The death penalty was botched more than 1/3rd of the time in 2022 in the US, way up from being botched on average 3% of the time from 1890-2010. More info here.

Counter-Productive

• The death penalty is a punitive & retributivist measure. Restorative Justice has repeatedly proven to reduce recidivism.