INDEX

Has the imposition of death improved our stance in this battle for security of our fellow man? Does it have a “sting” in the sense of deterring man from killing men, women and children? Has society been victorious in preventing the killing? The simple answer is that the death penalty in America has done little to deter or prevent those inclined to kill from killing. Another concern is whether our system has terminated the lives of innocent individuals. 3 Under these circumstances, what should we as a society do insofar as our criminal justice system is concerned? In this article I seek to address those questions and ultimately recommend an overhaul in our death penalty approach. Is it time to …

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
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• Themes list Networks,
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A recent cohort of studies report deterrent effects of capital punishment that substantially exceed almost all previous estimates of lives saved by execution. Some of the new studies go further to claim that pardons, commutations, and exonerations cause murders to increase, as does trial delay. This putative life-life tradeoff is the basis for claims by legal academics and advocates of a moral imperative to aggressively prosecute capital crimes, brushing off evidentiary doubts as unreasonable cautions that place potential beneficiaries at risk of severe harm. Challenges to this “new deterrence” literature find that the evidence is too unstable and unreliable to support policy choices on capital punishment. This article identifies numerous technical and conceptual errors in the “new deterrence” studies that further erode their reliability: inappropriate methods of statistical analysis, failures to consider several factors such as drug epidemics that drive murder rates, missing data on key variables in key states, the tyranny of a few outlier states and years, weak to non-existent tests of concurrent effects of incarceration, inadequate instruments to disentangle statistical confounding of murder rates with death sentences and other punishments, failure to consider the general performance of the criminal justice system as a competing deterrent, artifactual results from truncated time frames, and the absence of any direct test of the components of contemporary theoretical constructions of deterrence. Re-analysis of one of the data sets shows that even simple adjustments to the data produce contradictory results, while alternate statistical methods produce contrary estimates. But the central mistake in this enterprise is one of causal reasoning: the attempt to draw causal inferences from a flawed and limited set of observational data, the absence of direct tests of the moving parts of the deterrence story, and the failure to address important competing influences on murder. There is no reliable, scientifically sound evidence that pits execution against a robust set of competing explanations to identify whether it exerts a deterrent effect that is uniquely and sufficiently powerful to overwhelm the recurring epidemic cycles of murder. This and other rebukes remind us to invoke tough, neutral social science standards and commonsense causal reasoning before expanding the use of execution with its attendant risks and costs.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
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• Themes list Deterrence ,
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The secrecy that surrounds capital punishment in Japan is taken to extremes not seen in other nations. This article describes the Japanese state’s policy of secrecy and explains how it developed in three historical stages: the “birth of secrecy” during the Meiji period (1867 – 1912); the creation and spread of “censored democracy” during the postwar Occupation (1945 – 1952); and the “acceleration of secrecy” during the decades that followed. The article then analyzes several justifications for secrecy that Japanese prosecutors provide. None seems cogent. The final section explores four meanings of the secrecy policy that relate to the sources of death penalty legitimacy, the salience of capital punishment, the nature of Japan’s democracy, and the role and rule of law in Japanese society.

• Document type Article
• Countries list Japan
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• Themes list Transparency,
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The majority of those on death row in the Philippines have been convicted of rape crimes, including rape of a minor, rape of a family member and other aggravated forms of rape. Looking at incestuous rape in particular, this paper will examine some of the psychological and legal difficulties of imposing the death penalty for such a crime. It will focus on the effects the administration of the death penalty has on the victim and the victim’s family, as well as looking at some of the legal, evidential and procedural problems that arise in this jurisdiction’s imposition of the death penalty for rape.Despite the continued existence of the death penalty for incestuous rape, the number of reported cases has not diminished. Recognising this, local women’s groups in the Philippines have called for the root causes of incest and other forms of violence against women to be addressed rather than imposing the death penalty for rape. This response will also be considered within the broader context of Filipino gender relations.

• Document type Article
• Countries list Philippines
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• Themes list Networks,
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Activists have embraced the life-without-parole alternative because the availability of parole is often a key factor for jurors deciding whether of not to impose a sentence of life or death.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
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• Themes list Sentencing Alternatives,
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This paper examines Chinese students’ attitudes about the death penalty in contemporary China. Drawing upon Western public opinion research on the death penalty, samples of Chinese college students at home and abroad are used to explore the magnitude of their pro-death penalty attitudes and sources of variation in these opinions. Both groups of Chinese students are found to support the death penalty across different measures of this concept. Several individual and contextual factors are correlated with pro-death penalty attitudes, but the belief in the specific deterrent effect of punishments was the only variable that had a significant net effect on these attitudes in our multivariate analysis. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of this study for future research on public opinion about crime and punishment in China.

• Document type Article
• Countries list China
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• Themes list Public opinion, Public debate,
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Although Asia is the most important region of the world when it comes to capital punishment, it is also one of the most understudied. This article identifies four research questions that deserve attention from students and scholars who believe taking capital punishment seriously requires studying Asia seriously too. What are the empirical contours of capital punishment in contemporary Asia? What are the histories of capital punishment in Asia? Can Western theories of capital punishment explain patterns and changes in Asia? And what is the future of capital punishment in Asia? If researchers take the trouble to explore these questions, the death penalty will not only become an interesting window into law and society in Asia, but Asia will prove to be an instructive window into the death penalty—the gravest real-life problem in the law.

• Document type Article
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• Themes list Networks,
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A number of papers have recently appeared claiming to show that in the United States executions deter serious crime. There are many statistical problems with the data analyses reported. This article addresses the problem of “influence,” which occurs when a very small and atypical fraction of the data dominate the statistical results. The number of executions by state and year is the key explanatory variable, and most states in most years execute no one. A very few states in particular years execute more than five individuals. Such values represent about 1 percent of the available observations. Reanalyses of the existing data are presented showing that claims of deterrence are a statistical artifact of this anomalous 1 percent.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
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• Themes list Deterrence , Statistics,
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The issue of whether innocent people have been executed is now at the center of the debate concerning the legitimacy of capital punishment. The purpose of this research was to use data collected by the Gallup Organization in 2003 to investigate whether Americans who believed that an innocent person had been executed were less likely to support capital punishment. We also explored whether the association varied by race, given that African Americans are disproportionately affected by the death penalty. Our results indicated that three-quarters of Americans believed that an innocent person had been executed for a crime they did not commit within the last five years and that this belief was associated with lower levels of support for capital punishment, especially among those who thought this sanction was applied unfairly. In addition, our analyses revealed that believing an innocent person had been executed had a stronger association with altering African American than white support for the death penalty.A key claim of death penalty advocates is that a high proportion of the public supports capital punishment. In this context, scholars opposing this sanction have understood the importance of showing that the public’s support for executing offenders is contingent and shallower than portrayed by typical opinion polls. The current research joins this effort by arguing that the prospect of executing innocents potentially impacts public support for the death penalty and, in the least, creates ideological space for a reconsideration of the legitimacy of capital punishment.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
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• Themes list Innocence,
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If statistics are any indication, the system may well be allowing some innocent defendants to be executed.

• Document type Article
• Countries list United States
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• Themes list Innocence,
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