In tes­ti­mo­ny before the Massachusetts Joint Committee on the Judiciary regard­ing pro­posed leg­is­la­tion to ini­ti­ate a ​“fool­proof” death penal­ty, Columbia Law School Professor Jeffrey Fagan (pic­tured) ana­lyzed recent stud­ies that claimed that cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment deters mur­ders. He stat­ed that the stud­ies ​“fall apart under close scruti­ny.” Fagan not­ed that the stud­ies are fraught with tech­ni­cal and con­cep­tu­al errors, includ­ing inap­pro­pri­ate meth­ods of sta­tis­ti­cal analy­sis, fail­ures to con­sid­er all rel­e­vant fac­tors that dri­ve mur­der rates, miss­ing data on key vari­ables in key states, weak to non-exis­tent tests of con­cur­rent effects of incar­cer­a­tion, and oth­er defi­cien­cies.

​“A close read­ing of the new deter­rence stud­ies shows quite clear­ly that they fail to touch this sci­en­tif­ic bar, let alone cross it,” Fagan said as he told mem­bers of the com­mit­tee that the recent deter­rence stud­ies fell well short of the demand­ing stan­dards of social sci­ence research. (J. Fagan, Public Policy Choices on Deterrence and the Death Penalty: A Critical Review of New Evidence, tes­ti­mo­ny before the Joint Committee on the Judiciary of the Massachusetts Legislature on House Bill 3934, July 14, 2005). Read the full text of Fagan’s testimony. 

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