Should the U.S. Abolish the Death Penalty?

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There has never been any doubt that capital punishment is a specific deterrent. The killer who dies cannot kill again, but in the last decade a series of academic studies have shown that executions mean less murder, less innocent victims. This is the number rarely bandied about by those who fashion themselves “abolitionists.” They claim the moral high ground and point to a system they claim is fatally flawed. But they do not speak of what happens when society fails to incapacitate the worst of the worst killers. Since the death penalty was reinstated by the United States Supreme Court in 1976 there have been about 600,000 murders in America and just over 1000 killers executed.

The death penalty is used rarely, as it should be and as the criminal justice improves there are fewer death sentences. This is because prosecutors are being more discriminating about the cases they submit to juries for capital punishment, the Supreme Court has narrowed the categories of murders for which the death penalty is even available as a choice for juries.

As progressive law professor Cass Sunstein says is his paper “Is Capital Punishment Morally Required,” how can we exclude capital punishment if we know with certainty that innocent people will be murdered without it?