Experience Shows No ​“Parade of Horribles” Following Abolition of the Death Penalty

States that have recent­ly abol­ished the death penal­ty have not expe­ri­enced the ​“parade of hor­ri­bles” — includ­ing increased mur­der rates — pre­dict­ed by death-penal­ty pro­po­nents, accord­ing to death-penal­ty experts who par­tic­i­pat­ed in a pan­el dis­cus­sion at the 2017 American Bar Association nation­al meet­ing in New York City. Instead, the pan­elists said, abo­li­tion appears to have cre­at­ed oppor­tu­ni­ties to move for­ward with oth­er broad­er crim­i­nal justice reforms. 

The tran­script of that pan­el pre­sen­ta­tion, Life After the Death Penalty: Implications for Retentionist States, which was post­ed by the ABA on January 3, fea­tures dis­cus­sion of the polit­i­cal fac­tors that con­tributed to repeal and research into the effects of death-penal­ty abo­li­tion in those states in which repeal has recent­ly occurred. The pan­el dis­cus­sion, joint­ly host­ed by the American Bar Association Section of Civil Rights and Social Justice and the New York City Bar Association in August 2017, fea­tured four speak­ers with back­grounds in death-penal­ty activism, reform, or research: Thomas P. Sullivan, Co-Chair of the 2000 Commission on Capital Punishment in Illinois; Shari Silberstein, Executive Director of Equal Justice USA; Celeste Fitzgerald, for­mer Director of New Jerseyans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty; and Robert Dunham, Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center. 

The first three speak­ers described the cir­cum­stances that led to abo­li­tion in the six states that leg­isla­tive­ly repealed or judi­cial­ly abol­ished cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment between 2007 and 2014 and explained how abo­li­tion spon­sors over­came oppo­nents’ argu­ments that, as Fitgerald char­ac­ter­ized it, ​“abo­li­tion would bring about a ​‘parade of hor­ri­bles.’” Silberstein sum­ma­rized those wor­ries, say­ing, ​“The death penal­ty pro­po­nents’ argu­ments were all the tra­di­tion­al ones you would expect. They talked about the blood­bath that would come if there were no death penal­ty: mur­ders would spike; the killings of police offi­cers would spike; killings of cor­rec­tions offi­cers would spike.” Dunham dis­cussed DPIC’s research on three decades of mur­der rates in the U.S., which, he said, shows that abo­li­tion of the death penal­ty had no dis­cernible effect on mur­der rates in gen­er­al or mur­der rates of police and cor­rec­tions offi­cers killed in the line of duty. 

Dunham said that if the argu­ments advanced by death-penal­ty pro­po­nents were fac­tu­al­ly sup­port­ed, mur­der rates in gen­er­al and the rates at which police and cor­rec­tions offi­cers were killed should have risen after states abol­ished the death penal­ty, both in those states and in com­par­i­son to trends in oth­er states. And, Dunham said, ​“if — as oppo­nents of death-penal­ty abo­li­tion had argued — police offi­cers were espe­cial­ly vul­ner­a­ble with­out the death penal­ty and its repeal would lead to ​‘open sea­son on police offi­cers,’ you’d expect to see not just an increase in the rate at which police offi­cers were killed, but an increase in the num­ber of mur­ders of police offi­cers as a per­cent­age of all homi­cides.” None of this hap­pened, he said. Instead, mur­ders of law enforce­ment offi­cers were much low­er in the states that recent­ly abol­ished the death penal­ty. “[T]he death penal­ty appears to make no mea­sur­able con­tri­bu­tion to police safe­ty,” Dunham said. 

The pan­elists also observed that repeal of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment had cre­at­ed an oppor­tu­ni­ty for addi­tion­al crim­i­nal jus­tice reform. Sullivan not­ed that, pri­or to repeal, “[a] great deal of time, atten­tion, and effort were spent on the few cas­es that involved the death penal­ty in Illinois, while lit­tle atten­tion was giv­en to the huge num­ber of peo­ple who were con­vict­ed and incar­cer­at­ed for crimes. All that time, atten­tion, and mon­ey can now be shift­ed to reform­ing the entire Illinois crim­i­nal jus­tice sys­tem. That would mean that there has been a dou­ble ben­e­fit from hav­ing abol­ished the death penal­ty in Illinois.” Silberstein said that in New York, abo­li­tion per­mit­ted ​“stake­hold­ers who could not talk to each oth­er in the same way when the death penal­ty was on the table because [of] dif­fer­ences over the death penal­ty” to dis­cuss ​“how best to achieve the key goals of safe­ty and heal­ing [and] work on increas­ing fund­ing and pro­grams to reduce violence.”