NEW PODCAST: DPIC Study Finds No Evidence that Death Penalty Deters Murder or Protects Police

A Death Penalty Information Center analy­sis of U.S. mur­der data from 1987 through 2015 has found no evi­dence that the death penal­ty deters mur­der or pro­tects police. Instead, the evi­dence shows that mur­der rates, includ­ing mur­ders of police offi­cers, are con­sis­tent­ly high­er in death-penal­ty states than in states that have abol­ished the death penal­ty. And far from expe­ri­enc­ing increas­es in mur­der rates or open sea­son on law enforce­ment, the data show that states that have abol­ished the death penal­ty since 2000 have the low­est rates of police offi­cers mur­dered in the line of duty and that killings of police account for a much small­er per­cent­age of mur­ders in those states. 

In a new Discussions With DPIC pod­cast, ​“Does Capital Punishment Deter Murder?,” DPIC Fellow Seth Rose and Executive Director Robert Dunham explore the asser­tions long made by death-penal­ty pro­po­nents that cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment advances pub­lic safe­ty by deter­ring mur­ders and by pro­tect­ing police offi­cers. Dunham said the short answer — after ana­lyz­ing twen­ty-nine years of annu­al mur­der data from FBI Uniform Crime Reports (“UCR”) and FBI annu­al data on Law Enforcement Officers Killed & Assaulted, Officers Feloniously Killed (“LEOKA reports”) — is no. 

“There’s no evi­dence that the death penal­ty deters mur­der and there’s no evi­dence that it pro­tects the police,” Dunham says. ​“Murder rates may be affect­ed by many things, but the death penal­ty does­n’t appear to be one of them.” 

DPIC divid­ed the states into three cat­e­gories to ana­lyze mur­ders and mur­der trends: states that have long had the death penal­ty (“death-penal­ty states”), states that have long abol­ished cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment (“non-death-penal­ty states”), and states that have abol­ished cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment since 2000 (“tran­si­tion­al states”). The data show that the death-penal­ty states had an over­all UCR mur­der rate that was 1.39 times high­er than the non-death penal­ty states and account­ed for 12 of the 16 states with the high­est mur­der rates. Police offi­cers were mur­dered in death-penal­ty states at a rate that was 1.37 times high­er than in non-death-penal­ty states, and account­ed for 22 of the 25 states with the high­est LEOKA rates of offi­cers felo­nious­ly killed. Killings of police were low­est, how­ev­er, in the tran­si­tion­al states that most recent­ly abol­ished the death penal­ty. And while killings of offi­cers account­ed for 33 of every 10,000 mur­ders in both death-penal­ty and non-death-penal­ty states, they were 1.6 times low­er in transitional states. 

What the num­bers show, Dunham says, is that ​“the death penal­ty does­n’t dri­ve mur­der rates; mur­der rates dri­ve the death penal­ty.” While the death penal­ty, he says, ​“makes no mea­sur­able con­tri­bu­tion” to police safe­ty, ​“the rate at which police offi­cers are killed dri­ves the polit­i­cal debate about the death penalty.”