A new edi­tion of the Stanford Law Review con­tains an arti­cle enti­tled Uses and Abuses of Empirical Evidence in the Death Penalty Debate. The arti­cle exam­ines and per­forms com­par­i­son tests on recent stud­ies that have claimed a deter­rent effect to the death penal­ty. Authors John J. Donohue of Yale Law School and Justin Wolfers of the University of Pennsylvania state their goal and con­clu­sions:

(O)ur aim in this Article is to pro­vide a thor­ough assess­ment of the sta­tis­ti­cal evi­dence on this impor­tant pub­lic pol­i­cy issue and to under­stand bet­ter the con­flict­ing evi­dence.
…
Our esti­mates sug­gest not just ​“rea­son­able doubt” about whether there is any deter­rent effect of the death penal­ty, but pro­found uncer­tain­ty.
…
We are led to con­clude that there exists pro­found uncer­tain­ty about the deter­rent (or anti­de­ter­rent) effect of the death penal­ty; the data tell us that cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment is not a major influ­ence on homi­cide rates, but beyond this, they do not speak clear­ly. Further, we sus­pect that our con­clu­sion that econo­met­ric stud­ies are high­ly uncer­tain about the effects of the death penal­ty will per­sist for the fore­see­able future.
…
Aggregating over all of our esti­mates, it is entire­ly unclear even whether the pre­pon­der­ance of evi­dence sug­gests that the death penal­ty caus­es more or less murder. 

58 Stanford Law Review 791 (2005) See Law Reviews and Deterrence.

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