Capital Punishment Deters Crime More Than The Death Penalty

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Briggs, the statistician of the stars.

[00:00:02]And today is sort of depressing topic.

[00:00:05]Uh I wanted to argue that capital punishment deters crime. Certainly deters crime. And that the death penalty, there's a distinction to be made. Also deters crime, but not to the same extent. And the reason this came up, there was uh the recent case of this guy named Tanner, what's his name?

[00:00:27]Tanner her uh who committed terrible crimes, was recently convicted.

[00:00:32]Crimes so awful, I don't want to describe them. There there's no point to it. Uh crimes so awful that even Stephen King would not uh would not write of them. Uh but he was recently convicted and I believe he was also sentenced to death. And a priest was writing that her did in fact deserve the death penalty. He he wrote that Hoarder deserved a death penalty, had it coming, but that we should not execute him. And there's all kind of moral reasons why uh for and against these this topic and all very good a rich topic and all should be discussed and so forth. But chief among the reasons the priest gave uh is that the capital punishment of the death penalty does not deter crime, he says. And and this is false. It's it's absolutely false. I'm going to prove to you that in fact uh capital punishment and the death penalty both deter crime. And that's all we're going to talk about. We're not going to talk about any of these other moral uh moral difficulties or advantages due to the death penalty per se. All of that is a separate conversation. I'm only going to talk about only going to argue that executing a criminal in a just manner, a a convicted criminal where we know the guilt of the criminal uh to moral certainty. Moral certainty is a topic we brought up before and people had questions about that. But you know what it means? Guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. That sort of guilt where we know that the person is guilty. There's absolutely no question of the guilt hero's case. uh we have uh video there's video of of the things of the atrocities I guess is the best word and his full confession and the like. So there's no possibility here that we've made a mistake. Okay. So uh and it is true. It's absolutely also true and there's no question about this that sometimes the innocent uh are executed.

[00:02:36]they're wrongly convicted. At the time of their conviction though, everybody does believe in fact that they are guilty on the jury and the judge in that in that arena believe his guilt. And even if a person is exonerated, so Joe Blow is exonerated later. a criminal arguing with himself, a wouldbe criminal arguing with himself. He learns, he says to himself, "Well, Joe Blow, I heard was recently exonerated, but uh postumously, you know, they found evidence after he was executed that he was in fact not guilty of the exact crime for which he was convicted." And the criminal is thinking to himself, that means that I'm going to go ahead and commit this crime.

[00:03:20]I'm not going to be deterred by the threat of execution. uh that doesn't really ring true. So even if and it's a horrible thing to contemplate the innocent are occasionally rarely very rarely executed. Uh you cannot say that that does not deter crime uh because it will also turn out to deter crime. And now I want to make the uh this is what I really want to do. I want to make the artificial it's artificial I agree but I think useful uh designation between two types of the ultimate penalty. I'm going to call one the capital punishment. This is the just and swift and timely execution of sentence of a person whose guilt is beyond all reasonable doubt.

[00:04:06]I want to contrast that with the idea of the death penalty where the uh the sentence is also death but where the person the criminal and the society as a large more or less knows this could take years decades and probably never for most people who are convicted of death.

[00:04:25]They'll never they'll never get that penalty. They they can through various appeals through pandering because of official victim status all this kind of thing. uh and even and even people who have been sentenced to death are often let out of prison not sentenced to death or even sentenced to life have been let out of prison. So I want to I want to distinguish between capital punishment again which just for our to give purchase to this so I don't have to keep saying it uh that we have the the just and swift execution now there is no capital punishment anywhere in the United States at least right now there are it does exist in other in a few other loces but in the United States no there is the death penalty in some states only not all states have uh the the ultimate punishment And the death penalty in those states, for most of those states, is a long drawn out affair in which the convicted may reasonably argue with himself that he will, even though if he is convicted, never suffer that penalty. Okay? But I'm going to argue that even under capital punishment, I think it's more or less clear that the deterrence of crime happens. And I'm going to describe what I mean by deterrence here in just a second. under the death penalty. I think it also happens but uh to a far lesser extent. Okay. So let's consider uh I'm gonna consider a guy named his name was Kenneth McDuff.

[00:05:54]There's two kinds of deterrence. There's two kinds of deterrence a hard or a strong deterrence and a soft or a weak kind of deterrence deterrence.

[00:06:05]So and that this doesn't matter about the penalty now capital punishment or death penalty. This is different. We're talking about deterrence here. Does the the threat of execution deter crime and there's two kinds of ways in which deterrence happens? So there's this guy Kenneth McDuff. This is a real person.

[00:06:23]Uh he was convicted. He was known uh to be guilty of killing three teams, all capital crimes. He was sentenced to death. He was sentenced to death, but he was not executed. And of course, he was eventually released. He was let out of prison and when he was released he went on to kill several other women. Now uh he's far from alone. Far from alone. Uh there's an article I found and there's many many cases of this. This article is aptly titled uh parrolled murderers who were freed only to kill again. Parrolled murderers who were freed only to kill again. Very very evocative title. Uh this happens all the time. Uh so these crimes would have been deterred. This is a hard strong deterrence if execution was carried out immediately. So capital punishment or even the death penalty when it happens deters these further crimes. All right, that's one form of deterrence, a hard form of deterrence in a very strong sense. So trivial, it's necessarily true that if we execute the criminal and don't let him go on to to be released and to commit more crimes, we are deterring those crimes. That's that's indisputably true.

[00:07:45]There's another sense to to the same hard deterrence though and one that's uh that we have to think about which is which is not so good. So we have a heinous offender, a heinous offender.

[00:07:56]And uh if we execute him, it also deters crimes against his person.

[00:08:07]So right now there's a lot of people saying that this her person uh they would be they would welcome a lynch mob.

[00:08:15]They would welcome a lynch mob outside of prison. They would certainly welcome if it would occur inside prison. And in fact, a lot of people are expecting and happy to hear about other criminals inside prison who will uh if not kill her, at least hurt him badly. And so a lot of people cheer on these kind of crimes, this kind of vigilanteism, which of course weakens and reduces the rule of law. And it's squeamish rulers even.

[00:08:46]And a lot of people secretly hope for these sorts of punishments inside prison. uh that because we are too effeminate to carry out these punishments to execute her justly and swiftly, we're hoping somebody else does the bloody work for us. And so the crime, these crimes that are committed by these people, we're putting temptation in their way. We're increasing the crime rate by not killing uh her as he has coming or these other criminals as they have coming, justly executed. and we're encouraging uh a weakening of the rule of law because we ourselves can't bring ourselves to do the proper thing that we need to do. So this is very telling on us that we're very happy to let somebody else do commit these crimes which we'll turn a blind eye to and say we have we didn't do them after all but we hope for them. So this is a very bad state. Now that's strong or hard deterrence where we know with absolute certainty that uh these crimes if the criminal is uh the the person duly convicted for capital crimes is uh convicted and executed swiftly. Now we know that those type of crimes are deterred. There's no statistics needed. There's no nothing needed. We just have we just have the these obvious arguments. So, I have a headline here and all of these things I'm writing about here are going to be as always at my site. There'll be a link down below wmriggs.substack.com or just.com and you can find all this. I have this particular uh I have this particular headline here. Chicago judge releases cop killer because he may be on the path to making better decisions. So, a guy was uh this is a true headline that the the judge released a cop killer because he may be on to the path of making better decisions. May, of course, he may not be on the path to making better decisions and the guy was let go. So, let's consider let's consider Saquan Black.

[00:10:58]This is a this is a what do they call it? A composite character. It's not a real character. I made this name up.

[00:11:05]That he has been arrested many times for many in various crimes uh including some that would have merited capital punishment had he not plea bargained himself into uh lesser charges. And in any case, he was eventually released sometimes immediately after each particular crime. Now, but Black has moved to a new state. He's moved to a new state which has reinstituted capital punishment, not the death penalty, but capital punishment, swift and sure execution of sentence and in which it's well publicized that criminals are meeting their just and swift fate. And he knows this and he pers this and thinks about it and thinks, well, you know what? I'm not going to rob this gas station after all because if I'm caught, they're going to convict me and they're going to kill me. So crime is deterred in that way. That's a softer kind of a deterrence where the criminal worries about his own possible punishment. Okay, that's a soft kind of deterrence because it doesn't happen in every mind uh and it doesn't happen in every person in the same way even in the same person in the same way.

[00:12:18]Now, uh, the argument is obvious. The more uh that the more likely that the criminal thinks of his own punishment, the stronger the effect of deterrence up to a point, up to a limit. There's a limit because crimes of passion will always be with us. Uh, people, you know, flip their lid. They they we often all the story of mankind is one bloody event after another where people do things against their own uh best judgment. against their own person that they would have been better not to do. So, uh no level of penalty that we could set will eliminate all these kinds of crimes. So, deterrence works but only up to a point. But it seems to be obvious knowing everything we know about the uh about the essence or the nature of man man the animal that the more likely that the criminal would be criminal thinks of his punishment the less likely that he is to commit the crime up to a point up to a point. Okay.

[00:13:25]Deterrence then is a function of mind.

[00:13:27]It's a function of of what is on the mind of criminals and would be criminals. And of course, it's very difficult and in fact impossible to know the mind of another with any absolute certainty. So, we're not going to be able to uh let me think about how do I say this.

[00:13:47]It's we we can't really know the the mind of an individual man that well. We certainly cannot know it the mind of millions of men and we can't measure the state of uh we cannot measure the states of crimes that were not committed because of the state of mind of the wouldbe criminal. So it's a counterfactual. We can't go out and measure it. It's it's impossible to measure that which did not happen. So we can't uh we can't look to any kind of way and try to find this kind of thing statistically or something like this.

[00:14:21]There are people who try and uh this is the the idea of bad statistics. So what what they do in these kind of studies is they look at rates of capital pun or they look at uh the rates of capital punishment worthy crimes that are committed before and after the death penalty was instituted.

[00:14:41]All of these are a form of the epidemiologist fallacy. If you remember the epidemiologist fallacy, I'll have links to it if you don't can't remember all these things. This is when a researcher says X causes Y. X causes Y but where X is never measured.

[00:14:56]And the and the causal ascription is given by some wee p value or some statistical test or some facious argument like this. And all those tests that statistitians use are fallacies.

[00:15:09]We've we've talked about this many times in class and I'll have a link for you below. In our case, X is uh capital punishment itself doesn't deter the crime except for capital punishment certainly does hard deterrence, but we're most often thinking of soft deterrence where we're influencing men's minds. We're never measuring those minds. So, we are in the epidemiologist fallacy right here because we can't measure the state of men's minds. So, so all those uh all of those factors come into play and and not just that but we have our our culture is constantly changing especially here in the United States. We have the the the tacit up until recently open borders. So the we have uh the changing demographics, we have changing populations, we have changing mores, all of these sort of things all coming together in a big giant mix and it would be impossible to pull out cause of uh individuals from this mix. The best we could do is rough correlations. This is why though the changing uh demographics, the changing nature of men themselves, various races of men, various groups of men, various families of men, however you want to say it, that makes even comparisons such as comparing uh crime rates across countries uh fraught with difficulties because Singapore for instance has the absolute lowest among measurable c countries uh of uh murder murder rate. So the murder rate in Singapore is extremely low. And they of course have capital punishment, not the not the death penalty. They execute criminals. They have corporal punishment too. Those who commit lesser offenses are canained and swiftly. Of course, that really reduces crime. But then on the other hand, Jamaica, Jamaica has the highest murder rate of all countries measured up the last time these kind of things were measured. I mean, there's pluses and minus to all these sorts of things, but Jamaica has the highest, and Jamaica has the death penalty. So, you can't just look at things like whether the death penalty exists. It doesn't it doesn't help answer the question because there are other things about these two cultures, things that were forbidden to talk about, for instance, that account for the difference. Why Singapore has such a low murder rate and why Jamaica has such a high murder rate. Uh but in any case for both of them if capital punishment is there if capital punishment is would absolutely deter crime in the hard sense and it still does to a certain extent with the death penalty in the soft case. Okay. So all of these difficulties all of these difficulties are why there's a review paper of a guy named Daniel Negan. I think this is the most cited review paper of looking at all of the papers and studies and research tried to tie the death penalty to whether or not it reduces crime. uh he wrote, "Studies of the deterrent effect of capital punishment provide no useful information on the topic." Well, that bland conclusion is precisely we we would expect uh given our knowledge of man, given our our our all historical knowledge, given our knowledge of the races, given our knowledge of the interactions of men all through history, we would expect exactly that. So that's what that that's the kind of arguments that we need. We need those kinds of arguments. These are obvious arguments, I think, and trying to point towards statistics and trying to hope in some vague sense we're going to learn something from them is is not going to work.

[00:18:49]Uh I want to I want to quote Steve Goldberg. Steve Steven Goldberg he wrote two books. I'm going to quote from both here. These are great books, excellent books. When wish replaces Thought. And I want you to buy both of these books if you can find them. and fads and fallacies in the social sciences. He also wrote the uh preface or the forward I guess it is to uncertainty my uncertainty and there's just lovely books. He is one of the sociologist of the old school the kind that doesn't exist anymore. So but he wrote and when wish replaces thought thinking about the death penalty he he said here in the case of penalties we have an enormous amount of both informal and formal evidence from everyday experience of socializing children and limiting adult behavior from such experiments as increasing the fees for parking violations. That as a general rule the greater punishment the fewer people will behave in the punished way.

[00:19:54]which I take to be obvious and so does Goldberg. And he continues, thus it is perfectly reasonable to expect that the death penalty would have a more dissuasive effect than would life imprisonment.

[00:20:06]And there is no a priority reason to believe that increase uh that the increase from the threat of life imprisonment to that of death fails to dissuade anyone from committing murder.

[00:20:18]The harsher the penalty, the more uh the criminal is likely to think that he may suffer that penalty and the less likely he is to commit the more heinous crime.

[00:20:28]That is the nature of man. We know this from all history. We we don't need necessarily any kind of formal statistical test to do these kinds of things. And he continues on this line and I'm going to now quote from fads and fallacies. Uh he was wondering what follows now. What follows from either side being wrong? Because of course those who are for the death penalty can be wrong in one way and those who are against it can be wrong in another. So here's what he says about that. Let's say he says that the proponent of the death penalty is incorrect. Okay, in his belief that the death penalty does deter and we do invoke the death penalty. So the death the guy for the death penalty thinks it deters crime and he's wrong.

[00:21:13]It doesn't. And yet we still execute criminals who are justly deserving of execution. All he puts all in quotes.

[00:21:23]All we have done is execute murderers who should not have been executed if deterrence is the only justification.

[00:21:30]And undeniably and horribly a very few people who are innocent will also be executed. Okay, that's if the death penalty deter camp is wrong. But what about the other camp? Now he continues, "But now let's say that the opponent of the death penalty is incorrect in his belief that the death penalty doesn't deter and that we don't invoke the death penalty.

[00:21:53]We all of us you and I dear reader listener I should say we says Goldberg will be responsible for the deaths of innocent people those whose deaths would have been prevented by the deterrent effect of the death penalty." So what we have before us here is a real life trolley problem. You know the trolley problem. I I pointed to it a couple of weeks ago or last week was it or the week before. The real life trolley problem. You know you have uh you can pull the lever and uh sidetrack the trolley which will certainly kill a very small number of people or you can let the trolley go on and let it kill a large number of people. That's what's happening in this death penalty thing here. We we don't want our we don't want to become barbarians like the like the people who are the actual murderers and so forth. So we don't justly execute them and knowing they're going to go on and commit greater crimes at least crimes against them will happen and when they're eventually set free as more and more uh criminals are they're going to commit more crimes more murders and so forth. So that's a larger number of if you just want to have the raw calculus of bodies a larger number of dead bodies are produced by not executing criminals than by executing them and having of course the very sad fate of a few very rare uh innocent people will be executed too. So these are tough moral questions.

[00:23:18]No question about that. But uh there's no possible way to say that death penalty does not deter. Uh it's capital punishment certainly deters and the hard way we talked about and in a soft way too just by our knowledge of uh of man from all history. Everywhere we look, we know this to be true. All right, that's it. So, I have a complete uh link to the written article which has all the links to the quotes that I gave you and all that sort of a thing at wmriggs.substack.com.

[00:23:51]Thanks very much for listening.