Nations that abol­ish the death penal­ty then tend to see their mur­der rates decline, accord­ing to a December 2018 report by the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, a Washington, DC-based orga­ni­za­tion that pro­motes human rights and democ­ra­cy in Iran. The report exam­ined mur­der rates in 11 coun­tries that have abol­ished cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, find­ing that ten of those coun­tries expe­ri­enced a decline in mur­der rates in the decade fol­low­ing abo­li­tion. Countries were includ­ed if they met the fol­low­ing cri­te­ria: they had for­mal­ly abol­ished the death penal­ty at least ten years ago, at least one death sen­tence had been imposed or car­ried out in the decade pri­or to abo­li­tion, and mur­der rate data was avail­able from the World Trade Organization. The coun­tries that met the study’s cri­te­ria were Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Poland, Serbia, Estonia, Latvia, Ukraine, South Africa, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, and Albania. (Click image to enlarge.)

The researchers com­pared mur­der rates in the ten years after abo­li­tion of the death penal­ty to the base­line rate in the year of abo­li­tion. Six of the abo­li­tion­ist coun­tries expe­ri­enced mur­der rates below the base­line all ten years fol­low­ing abo­li­tion. Four coun­tries had either one or two years in which mur­der rates were high­er than in the year of abo­li­tion, but saw mur­ders fall below the base­line with­in five years and expe­ri­enced over­all down­ward trends. Only one coun­try in the study, Georgia, saw mur­der rates trend upwards in the decade fol­low­ing abo­li­tion. One decade after abo­li­tion, the mur­der rates in these coun­tries declined by an aver­age of six mur­ders per 100,000 pop­u­la­tion. The authors con­clude, ​“Death penal­ty advo­cates’ fears that the state relin­quish­ing the ulti­mate pun­ish­ment will embold­en poten­tial crim­i­nals, or at least weak­en deter­rence, prove to be unfound­ed in light of this evidence.”

The data is con­sis­tent with state-lev­el data in the United States, which has repeat­ed­ly shown low­er mur­der rates in states that do not have the death penal­ty than in states that do and that the pres­ence or absence of the death penal­ty does not appear to affect mur­der trends. A 2017 DPIC analy­sis found that abol­ish­ing the death penal­ty had no mea­sur­able effect on mur­der rates in gen­er­al or the rate at which police offi­cers are killed, con­tra­dict­ing pop­u­lar argu­ments that the death penal­ty is nec­es­sary for pub­lic safe­ty and to pro­tect law enforcement officials.

(What Happens to Murder Rates when the Death Penalty is Scrapped? A Look at Eleven Countries Might Surprise You, Abdorrahman Boroumand Center, December 13, 2018.) See International and Deterrence.

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