“I do,” George W. Bush answered, without disagreement from Al Gore. “It’s the only reason to be for it.” Mr. Bush, so far as I can tell, was wrong on both scores. There are a number of compelling rationales for capital punishment. And deterrence, upon examination, doesn’t appear to be one of them. When I started my Commission work, I felt that if it could be established that a death sentence, as opposed to life imprisonment, actually deters other people from committing murders, it would have to weigh heavily in any candid assessment of the subject. As a result, I became an unbearable noodge to the Commission’s gifted research director, Jean Templeton, who is both a lawyer and a sociologist by training, as I sought her assistance in wading through the learning in this area. At one point, I even persuaded Jean to undertake a very informal statistical cross-comparison between Illinois and surrounding states. We ended up measuring Illinois against Michigan, and Missouri against Wisconsin, death penalty states versus non-death penalty states, pairs that had similar urban density, racial makeup, and income levels.
What do You think about Ultimate Punishment (2003)?
