SO FAREWELL then, Joe Biden, you won’t be missed. His final months have been marked by a number of egregious decisions (such as pardoning his son) that even Democrats have squirmed trying to justify. One little-remarked topic on which he and Donald Trump differ is the death penalty.
In 2019, Trump announced that executions for federal crimes would be resumed and subsequently 13 death row inmates were executed. Six months after Joe Biden’s inauguration, his Attorney General Merrick Garland imposed a moratorium on federal executions. On December 23, 2024, President Biden commuted the sentences of 37 of the 40 individuals on federal death row to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
The debate on capital punishment somehow never really gets going. Rather like abortion, capital punishment has become a subject that our mainstream media and ruling political class would rather not discuss – so let’s discuss it. Let’s acknowledge that irrespective of how strongly anyone might feel on the matter, it’s worth asking whether it actually works. However how much some sadist deserves a fair trial and a fair execution, one should ask it if it is actually going to make any difference to the likelihood of future monsters doing the same.
There are a lot of bad arguments on both sides of the death penalty debate. Opponents will point to the United States as an example of the death penalty not working, claiming that states using the death penalty have as much murder as those that do not. There are several problems with this thinking. Not only are there significant cultural and socio-economic differences across the USA that might affect murder rates, many of the states that retain the death penalty either don’t use it or use it so rarely.
Today there are 27 states where the death penalty is legal but in seven of them a variety of moratoriums are in place. Only 15 states have executed anyone since 2015 and nearly 40 per cent of those executions have taken place in Texas, more than triple the number of any other state. With the death penalty used so little, it’s questionable whether it has any deterrent effect. Criminals are usually smart enough to work out the likely consequences of their lawbreaking.
So really the argument in the US is Texas versus the rest of the country. Bear with me while I explain the chart below.
Sources: https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lists_of_people_executed_in_Texas
Texas’s murder rate has been historically high for the US. Although capital punishment has been used there since 1819, it’s often been in very small numbers. For example, there was an 18-year hiatus in executions between 1964 and 1982. After the Supreme Court lifted a ban on capital punishment in 1976, Texas re-introduced it in very limited numbers in the 1980s (the legal system’s appeal process can create a decades long interval between conviction and execution), then increasingly in the 1990s. The Texas murder rate fell at an unprecedented rate in the ten years to 1998. The US average murder rate also fell over this period but murders in Texas fell to the US average, having previously been about 50 per cent above it. The chart below shows more clearly how Texas’s murder rate has fallen relative to that of the whole country.
In short, before Texas adopted capital punishment with an enthusiasm not seen elsewhere in the US, its murder rate was at least 3 per 100,000 population greater than the country’s average and after it did, its murder rate fell to the US median. Given Texas’s population of c30million, that means at least 900 fewer murders each year can be credited to the deterrent effect of capital punishment.
Texas shows what happens when capital punishment is introduced. The UK shows what happens when capital punishment is removed. The last two hangings were in August 1964. The Labour government elected in October 1964 was in favour of abolition and suspended the death penalty. Although abolition was introduced as a Private Member’s Bill, it was mentioned in the Queen’s Speech of that year and came into effect in November 1965. Although technically the impact of abolition might not have been until the following year, any would-be murderer in 1965 would know he or she would not face the gallows, so one can take that as the point from which to look at its impact.
Source: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/historical-crime-data
Annual murder statistics go back to 1898, when 328 were recorded. The number of murders varied between about 250-400 a year up to abolition, 325 of them in 1965. In the decade afterwards, the number of murders steadily increased to about 500 in 1975 (it was 591 in 2023, the most recent year for which official numbers are available). Attempted murders saw a similar increase after abolition, which makes sense: after all, a murder is just an attempted murder that was successful. So in the decade after abolition there were 150-200 more murders a year than there had been before, an increase of between half and two thirds, in the same ball park as the decrease in murders in Texas after it introduced capital punishment.
No proponent of the death penalty would claim it will stop all murders; it never it did. It would be irrelevant to those intent on, say, murder-suicide. But the experience of Texas and the UK suggests it could reduce the number of murders by about a third.
Of course, correlation isn’t proof of causation. But a correlation may be evidence of causation and any correlation needs an explanation. The changes in murder rates in the Texas and UK happened too quickly to be explained by cultural or socio-economic factors. They occurred in different decades, so suggesting there’s something deeper going on in Anglo-Saxon countries doesn’t make sense. It’s not possible to run an experiment where one can suddenly stop or start capital punishment to measure its impact more carefully, but the experience of jurisdictions where this has in effect happened shows the death penalty has a material deterrent effect on murder.
Tomorrow I will consider the most popular objections to capital punishment.
