death penalty research papers

Uses and Abuses of Empirical Evidence in the Death Penalty Debate

Does the death penalty save lives? A surge of recent interest in this question has yielded a series of papers purporting to show robust and precise estimates of a substantial deterrent effect of capital punishment. We assess the various approaches that have been used in this literature, testing the robustness of these inferences. Specifically, we start by assessing the time series evidence, comparing the history of executions and homicides in the United States and Canada, and within the United States, between executing and non-executing states. We analyze the effects of the judicial experiments provided by the Furman and Gregg decisions and assess the relationship between execution and homicide rates in state panel data since 1934. We then revisit the existing instrumental variables approaches and assess two recent state-specific execution morartoria. In each case we find that previous inferences of large deterrent effects based upon specific examples, functional forms, control variables, comparison groups, or IV strategies are extremely fragile and even small changes in the specifications yield dramatically different results. The fundamental difficulty is that the death penalty -- at least as it has been implemented in the United States -- is applied so rarely that the number of homicides that it can plausibly have caused or deterred cannot be reliably disentangled from the large year-to-year changes in the homicide rate caused by other factors. As such, short samples and particular specifications may yield large but spurious correlations. We conclude that existing estimates appear to reflect a small and unrepresentative sample of the estimates that arise from alternative approaches. Sampling from the broader universe of plausible approaches suggests not just "reasonable doubt" about whether there is any deterrent effect of the death penalty, but profound uncertainty -- even about its sign.

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Donohue, John and Justin J. Wolfers. "The Death Penalty: No Evidence For Deterrence," The Economists' Voice, 2006, v3(5,Apr), Article 3.

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Criminological Research and the Death Penalty: Has Research by Criminologists Impacted Capital Punishment Practices?

• Published: 16 April 2019
• Volume 44 , pages 536–580, ( 2019 )

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• Gordon P. Waldo 1 &
• Wesley Myers 1  

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At the request of the SCJA president this paper addresses five questions. Does criminological research make a difference relative to the death penalty? - If criminological research does make a difference, what is the nature of that difference? - What specific instances can one cite of research findings influencing death penalty policy decisions? Why hasn’t our research made more of a difference? What can we do, either in terms of directing our research or in terms of disseminating it, to facilitate it making a difference? Specific examples of research directly impacting policy are examined. The evidence presented suggests that research on capital punishment has had some impact on policy, but not nearly enough. There is still a high level of ignorance that has limited the impact of criminological research on death penalty policy. The proposed solution is to improve the education of the general public and decision makers in order to increase the impact of criminological research on capital punishment policy.

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The Rule of Law: A Slogan in Search of a Concept

What is crime.

Situational Crime Prevention: Theory, Practice and Evidence

One of the most interesting things the senior author learned in his first statistics class as an undergraduate, which became much clearer when he took his first graduate research methods class, was that if a correlation exists between two variables it does not automatically mean that one of the variables caused the other variable. This is true even if the one that appeared to be the cause (independent variable) met the first criteria for causation and occurred prior to the presumed effect (dependent variable). As he began to teach the first research methods course ever taught in the Criminology Program at Florida State University he also learned about extraneous variables, intervening variables, component variables, antecedent variables, suppressor variables, distorter variables, spurious non-correlations, conditional relationships, conjoint influence, etc. (Rosenberg, 1968 ). These different types of variables will not be discussed, but their existence has relevance in trying to answer the questions posed to the panelists. Instead, reference will be made to ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ influences in this paper because each can be important in bringing about change.

Two other methods the courts have used in this regard is the number of states that have made a significant change in their death penalty statutes, such as the number of states changing the age for execution of juveniles (Thompson v. Oklahoma, 1988 ) . Another method the United States Supreme Court has used is international opinions. “It is proper that we acknowledge the overwhelming weight of international opinion …. The opinion of the world community, while not controlling our outcome, does provide respected and significant confirmation for our own conclusions” (Roper v. Simmons, 2005 p.11).

Warden describes the first exoneration as follows. “The first of what would become a cavalcade of post-Furman Illinois death row exonerations occurred in 1987 when a young prosecutor, Michael Falconer, came forward with exculpatory evidence that exonerated two condemned Chicagoans, Perry Cobb and Darby Tillis. It is hard to imagine more fortuitous or improbable events than those that led to the exonerations of Cobb and Tillis, who had been sentenced to death for a double murder that occurred a decade earlier.’ In 1983, the Illinois Supreme Court reversed and remanded their case because the trial judge had rejected a defense request to give the jury an accomplice instruction. The prosecution’s star witness, Phyllis Santini, had driven the getaway car used in the crime - admittedly but, she claimed, unwittingly. Chicago Lawyer , an investigative publication … carried a detailed article based on the Illinois Supreme Court opinion and case file. As luck would have it, Falconer, who recently had graduated from law school, read the article, which discussed Santini’s testimony in some depth. Years earlier, Falconer had worked with Santini at a factory and, as he would testify, she had told him that her boyfriend had committed a murder and that she and the boyfriend were working with police and prosecutors to pin it on someone else. “I thought to myself, ‘Jeez, there’s a name from the past,”‘Falconer reflected in a Chicago Lawyer interview. “I read on and started thinking, ‘Holy shit, this is terrible.”‘He called a defense lawyer mentioned in the article, reporting what Santini had told him. At an ensuing bench trial in 1987, Cobb and Tillis were acquitted by a directed verdict on the strength of Falconer’s testimony.” By then, Falconer was a prosecutor in a neighboring jurisdiction.” Cobb and Tillis eventually received gubernatorial pardons based on innocence. As serendipitous as the Cobb and Tillis exonerations” were, they were no more so than many that would follow. … (there were) 20 Illinois death row exonerations -each involving odds-defying fortuity. The error rate among 305 convictions under the 1977 Illinois capital punishment statute was in excess of 6% (Warden, 2012 p. 247–248).

Justice Marshall was careful to fully support his position surrounding the lack of a deterrent effect of the death penalty with two lengthy ‘laundry lists’ of research in the footnotes of his published opinion which are abbreviated here. “See, e. g., Jon Peck, The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: Ehrlich and His Critics, 85 Yale L. J. 359 (1976); David Baldus & James Cole, A Comparison of the Work of Thorsten Sellin and Isaac Ehrlich on the Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment, 85 Yale L. J. 170 (1975); William Bowers & Glenn Pierce, The Illusion of Deterrence in Isaac Ehrlich’s Research on Capital Punishment, 85 Yale L. J. 187 (1975); Issac Ehrlich. The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: A Question of Life and Death, 65 Am. Econ. Rev. 397 (June 1975); Hook, The Death Sentence, in The Death Penalty in America 146 (Hugo Adam Bedau ed. 1967); Thurston Sellin, The Death Penalty, A Report for the Model Penal Code Project of the American Law Institute (1959).” And “See Passell & Taylor, The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: Another View (unpublished Columbia University Discussion Paper 74–7509, Mar. 1975), reproduced in Brief for Petitioner App. E in Jurek v. Texas, O. T. 1975, No. 75–5844; Passell, The Deterrent Effect of the Death Penalty: A Statistical Test, 28 Stan. L. Rev. 61 (1975); Baldus & Cole, A Comparison of the Work of Thorsten Sellin & Isaac Ehrlich on the Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment, 85 Yale L. J. 170 (1975); Bowers & Pierce, The Illusion of Deterrence in Isaac Ehrlich’s Research on Capital Punishment, 85 Yale L. J. 187 (1975); Peck, The Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment: Ehrlich and His Critics, 85 Yale L. J. 359 (1976). See also Ehrlich, Deterrence: Evidence and Inference, 85 Yale L. J. 209 (1975); Ehrlich, Rejoinder, 85 Yale L. J. 368 (1976)… See also Bailey, Murder and Capital Punishment: Some Further Evidence, 45 Am. J. Orthopsychiatry 669 (1975); W. Bowers, Executions in America 121–163 (1974).”

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Waldo, G.P., Myers, W. Criminological Research and the Death Penalty: Has Research by Criminologists Impacted Capital Punishment Practices?. Am J Crim Just 44 , 536–580 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-019-09478-4

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-019-09478-4

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The Death Penalty in the United States

Whereas recent empirical research reviewing all death penalty cases in the United States concluded that two thirds of the death penalty cases from 1973 to 1995 were overturned on appeal with the most common reasons cited as incompetent counsel, inadequate investigative services, or the police and prosecutors withholding exculpatory evidence. (Liebman, Fagan, & West, 2000); and

Whereas the recent application of DNA technology has resulted in, as of June 2000, 62 post-conviction determinations of actual innocence, with eight of these having been for persons sentenced to death at trial (Scheck, Neufeld, Weyer, 2000; Wells, Malpass, Lindsay, Fisher, Turtle, & Fulero, 2000); and

Whereas research on the process of qualifying jurors for service on death penalty cases shows that jurors who survive the qualification process ("death-qualified jurors") are more conviction-prone than jurors who have reservations about the death penalty and are therefore disqualified from service. (Bersoff, 1987; Cowan, Thompson and Ellsworth, 1984; Ellsworth, 1988; Bersoff & Ogden, 1987; Haney, 1984); and

Whereas recent social science research reveals strong inconsistencies in prosecutors' decisions to seek the death penalty in particular cases, based on factors other than the severity of the crime. The "prosecutor is more likely to ask for a death sentence when the victim is European-American, of high social status, a stranger to the offender, and when counsel is appointed" (Beck & Shumsky, 1997, p. 534); and

Whereas race and ethnicity have been shown to affect the likelihood of being charged with a capital crime by prosecutors (e.g., Beck & Shumsky, 1997; Bowers, 1983; Paternoster, 1991; Paternoster & Kazyaka, 1988; Sorensen & Wallace, 1995) and therefore of being sentenced to die by the jury. Those who kill European-American victims are more likely to receive the death penalty, even after differences such as the heinousness of the crime, prior convictions, and the relationship between the victim and the perpetrator are considered. This is especially true for African-Americans (e.g., Keil & Vito, 1995; Thomson, 1997) and Hispanic-Americans who kill European-Americans (Thomson, 1997); and

Whereas psychological research consistently demonstrates that juries often misunderstand the concept of mitigation and its intended application (e.g., Haney & Lynch, 1994, 1997; Wiener, Pritchard, & Weston, 1995; Wiener, Hurt, Thomas, Sadler, Bauer & Sargent, 1998), so that mitigation factors, e.g., the defendant's previous life circumstances, mental and emotional difficulties and age, have little or no relation to penalty phase verdicts (Beck & Shumsky, 1997; Costanzo & Costanzo, 1994); and

Whereas death penalty prosecutions may involve persons with serious mental illness or mental retardation. Procedural problems, such as assessing competency, take on particular importance in cases where the death penalty is applied to such populations (Skeem, Golding, Berge & Cohn, 1998; Rosenfeld & Wall, 1988; Hoge, Poythress, Bonnie, Monahan, Eisenberg & Feucht-Haviar, 1997; Cooper & Grisso, 1997); and

Whereas death penalty prosecutions may involve persons under 18 (sometimes as young as 14). Procedural problems, such as assessing competency, take on particular importance in cases where the death penalty is applied to juveniles (Grisso & Schwartz, 2000; Lewis et al., 1988); and

Whereas capital punishment appears statistically neither to exert a deterrent effect (e.g., Bailey, 1983; 1990; Bailey & Peterson, 1994; Cheatwood, 1993; Costanzo, 1997; Decker & Kohfeld, 1984; Radelet & Akers, 1996; Stack, 1993) nor save a significant number of lives through the prevention of repeat offenses (Vito, Koester, & Wilson, 1991; Vito, Wilson, & Latessa, 1991); Further, research shows that the murder rate increases just after state-sanctioned executions (Bowers, 1988; Costanzo, 1998; Phillips, 1983; Phillips & Hensley, 1984);

Therefore be it resolved that the American Psychological Association:

Calls upon each jurisdiction in the United States that imposes capital punishment not to carry out the death penalty until the jurisdiction implements policies and procedures that can be shown through psychological and other social science research to ameliorate the deficiencies identified above.

Bailey, W. C. (1990). Murder, capital punishment, and television execution publicity and homicide rates. American Sociological Review, 55, 628-633.

Bailey, W. C. (1983). Disaggregation in deterrence and death penalty research: The case of murder in Chicago. The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 74(3), 827-859.

Bailey, W. C., & Peterson, R.D. (1994). Murder, capital punishment and deterrence: A review of the evidence and an examination of police killings. Journal of Social Issues, 50, 53-74.

Beck, J. C. & Shumsky, R. (1997). A comparison of retained and appointed counsel in cases of capital murder. Law and Human Behavior, 21(5), 525-538.

Bersoff, D.N. (1987). Social science data and the Supreme Court: Lockhart as a case in point. American Psychologist, 42(1), 52-58.

Bersoff, D.N. & Ogden, D.W. (1987). In the Supreme Court of the United States Lockhart v. McCree: amicus curiae brief for the American Psychological Association. American Psychologist, 42 (1), 59-68.

Bowers, W. J. (1983). The pervasiveness of arbitrariness and discrimination under post-Furman capital statutes. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 74(2), 1067-1100.

Bowers, W.J. (1988). The effect of execution is brutalization, not deterrence. In K.C. Haas and J.A. Inciardi (Eds.). Challenging capital punishment: Legal and social science approaches (49-90). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Cheatwood, D. (1993). Capital punishment and the deterrence of violent crime in comparable counties. Criminal Justice Review, 18(2), 165-181. Cooper, D. & Grisso, T. (1997). Five-year research update (1991-1995): Evaluations for competence to stand trial. Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 15(3), 347-364.

Costanzo, M. (1997). Just revenge: Costs and consequences of the death penalty. New York: St. Martins Press.

Costanzo, S., & Costanzo, M. (1994). Life or death decisions: An analysis of capital jury decision-making under the special issues framework. Law and Human Behavior, 18, 151-170.

Cowan, C.L. & Thompson, W. & Ellsworth, P. C. (1984). The effects of death qualification on jurors' predisposition to convict and on the quality of deliberation. Law and Human Behavior, 8, 53-80.

Decker, S. H. & Kohfeld, C. W. (1984). A deterrence study of the death penalty in Illinois, 1933-1980. Journal of Criminal Justice, 12, 367-377.

Ellsworth, P.C. (1988). Unpleasant facts: The Supreme Court's response to empirical research on capital punishment. In K.C. Haas and J.A. Inciardi (Eds.). Challenging capital punishment: Legal and social science approaches (177-211). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Grisso, T. & Schwartz, R. G. (Eds.). (2000). Youth on Trial: A Developmental Perspective on Juvenile Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Haney, C. (Ed.). (1984). Death qualification [Special issue]. Law and Human Behavior, 8 (1&2).

Haney, C. & Lynch, M. (1997). Clarifying life and death matters: An analysis of instructional comprehension and penalty phase closing arguments, Law and Human Behavior, 21(6), 575-595.

Haney, C. & Lynch, M. (1994). Comprehending life and death matters: A preliminary study of California's capital penalty instructions, Law and Human Behavior, 18, 411-436.

Hoge, S. K., Poythress, N., Bonnie, R. J., Monahan, J., Eisenberg, M. & Feucht-Haviar, T. (1997). The MacArthur adjudicative competence study: Diagnosis, psychopathology, and competence-related abilities. Behavioral Sciences & the Law, 15(3), 329-345.

Keil, T. J. & Vito, G. F. (1995). Race and the death penalty in Kentucky murder trials: 1976-1991. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 20(1), 17-36.

Lewis, D.O., Pincus, J.H., Bard B., Richardson, E. , Princher, L.S., Feldman, M. & Yeager, C. (1988). Neuropsychiatric, psychoeducational, and family characteristics of 14 juveniles condemned to death in the United States. American Journal of Psychiatry, 145(5), 584-589.

Liebman, J. S., Fagan, J., & West, V. (2000). A broken system: Error rates in capital cases, 1973-1995. [On-line]. Available: www.TheJusticeProject.org

Paternoster, R. & Kazyaka, A. (1988). Racial considerations in capital punishment: The failure of evenhanded justice. In K. C. Haas & J. A. Inciardi (Eds.), Challenging capital punishment: Legal and social science approaches (pp. 113-148). Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Paternoster, R. (1991). Prosecutorial discretion and capital sentencing in North and South Carolina. In R. M. Bohm (Ed.), The death penalty in America: Current research (pp. 39-52). Cincinnati, OH: Anderson.

Phillips, D.P. (1983). The impact of mass media violence in U.S. homicides. American Sociological Review, 48, 560-568.

Phillips, D.P. & Hensley, J.E. (1984). When violence is rewarded or punished: The impact of mass media stories on homicide. Journal of Communication, 34, 101-116.

Radelet, M. L. & Akers, R. L. (1996). Deterrence and the death penalty: The views of the experts. Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 87, 1-16.

Rosenfeld, B. & Wall, A. (1998). Psychopathology and competence to stand trial. Criminal Justice & Behavior, 25(4), 443-462.

Scheck, B., Neufeld, P., & Dwyer, W. (2000). Actual innocence. New York: Harper.

Skeem, J. L., Golding, S. L., Berge, G., & Cohn, N. B. (1998). Logic and reliability of evaluations of competence to stand trial. Law & Human Behavior, 22(5), 519-547.

Sorensen, J.R. & Wallace, D.H. (1995). Capital punishment in Missouri: Examining the issue of racial disparity. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 13(1), 61-81.

Stack, S. (1993). Execution publicity and homicide in Georgia. American Journal of Criminal Justice, 18(1), 25-39.

Thomson, E. (1997). Research note: Discrimination and the death penalty in Arizona. Criminal Justice Review, 22(1), 65-76.

Vito, G. F., Koester, P., & Wilson, D. G. (1991). Return of the dead: An update of the status of Furman-commuted death row inmates. In R. M. Bohm (Ed.), The death penalty in America: Current research (pp. 89-99). Cincinnati, OH: Anderson.

Vito, G. F., Wilson, D. G., & Latessa, E. J. (1991). Comparison of the dead: Attributes and outcomes of Furman-commuted death row inmates in Kentucky and Ohio. In R. M. Bohm (Ed.), The death penalty in America: Current research (pp. 101-111). Cincinnati, OH: Anderson.

Wells, G., Malpass, R., Lindsay, R., Fisher, R., Turtle, J., & Fulero, S. (2000). From the lab to the police station: A successful application of eyewitness research. American Psychologist, 55, 581-594.

Wiener, R., Hurt, L., Thomas, S., Sadler, M., Bauer, C., & Sarget, T. (1998). The role of declarative and procedural knowledge in capital murder cases. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 28, 124-144.

Wiener, R., Pritchard, C., & Weston, M. (1995). Comprehensibility of approved jury instructions in capital cases. Journal of Applied Psychology, 80, 455-467

August 2001

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Finding Sources for Death Penalty Research

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One of the most popular topics for an argument essay is the death penalty . When researching a topic for an argumentative essay , accuracy is important, which means the quality of your sources is important.

If you're writing a paper about the death penalty, you can start with this list of sources, which provide arguments for all sides of the topic.

Amnesty International Site

Amnesty International views the death penalty as "the ultimate, irreversible denial of human rights." This website provides a gold mine of statistics and the latest breaking news on the subject.

Mental Illness on Death Row

Death Penalty Focus is an organization that aims to bring about the abolition of capital punishment and is a great resource for information. You will find evidence that many of the people executed over the past decades are affected by a form of mental illness or disability.

Pros and Cons of the Death Penalty

This extensive article provides an overview of arguments for and against the death penalty and offers a history of notable events that have shaped the discourse for activists and proponents.

Pro-Death Penalty Links

This page comes from ProDeathPenalty and contains a state-by-state guide to capital punishment resources. You'll also find a list of papers written by students on topics related to capital punishment. 

• 50 Argumentative Essay Topics
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• Capital Punishment: Pros and Cons of the Death Penalty
• Pros & Cons of the Death Penalty
• 5 Arguments in Favor of the Death Penalty
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• New Challenges to the Death Penalty
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10 facts about the death penalty in the U.S.

Most U.S. adults support the death penalty for people convicted of murder, according to an April 2021 Pew Research Center survey . At the same time, majorities believe the death penalty is not applied in a racially neutral way, does not deter people from committing serious crimes and does not have enough safeguards to prevent an innocent person from being executed.

Use of the death penalty has gradually declined in the United States in recent decades. A growing number of states have abolished it, and death sentences and executions have become less common. But the story is not one of continuous decline across all levels of government. While state-level executions have decreased, the federal government put more prisoners to death under President Donald Trump than at any point since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.

As debates over the death penalty continue in the U.S. , here’s a closer look at public opinion on the issue, as well as key facts about the nation’s use of capital punishment.

This Pew Research Center analysis examines public opinion about the death penalty in the United States and explores how the nation has used capital punishment in recent decades. 

The public opinion findings cited here are based primarily on a Pew Research Center survey of 5,109 U.S. adults, conducted from April 5 to 11, 2021. Everyone who took part in the survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology . Here are the  questions used  from this survey, along with responses, and its  methodology .

Findings about the administration of the death penalty – including the number of states with and without capital punishment, the annual number of death sentences and executions, the demographics of those on death row and the average amount of time spent on death row – come from the Death Penalty Information Center and the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Six-in-ten U.S. adults strongly or somewhat favor the death penalty for convicted murderers, according to the April 2021 survey. A similar share (64%) say the death penalty is morally justified when someone commits a crime like murder.

Support for capital punishment is strongly associated with the view that it is morally justified in certain cases. Nine-in-ten of those who favor the death penalty say it is morally justified when someone commits a crime like murder; only a quarter of those who oppose capital punishment see it as morally justified.

A majority of Americans have concerns about the fairness of the death penalty and whether it serves as a deterrent against serious crime. More than half of U.S. adults (56%) say Black people are more likely than White people to be sentenced to death for committing similar crimes. About six-in-ten (63%) say the death penalty does not deter people from committing serious crimes, and nearly eight-in-ten (78%) say there is some risk that an innocent person will be executed.

Opinions about the death penalty vary by party, education and race and ethnicity. Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are much more likely than Democrats and Democratic leaners to favor the death penalty for convicted murderers (77% vs. 46%). Those with less formal education are also more likely to support it: Around two-thirds of those with a high school diploma or less (68%) favor the death penalty, compared with 63% of those with some college education, 49% of those with a bachelor’s degree and 44% of those with a postgraduate degree. Majorities of White (63%), Asian (63%) and Hispanic adults (56%) support the death penalty, but Black adults are evenly divided, with 49% in favor and 49% opposed.

Views of the death penalty differ by religious affiliation . Around two-thirds of Protestants in the U.S. (66%) favor capital punishment, though support is much higher among White evangelical Protestants (75%) and White non-evangelical Protestants (73%) than it is among Black Protestants (50%). Around six-in-ten Catholics (58%) also support capital punishment, a figure that includes 61% of Hispanic Catholics and 56% of White Catholics.

Opposition to the death penalty also varies among the religiously unaffiliated. Around two-thirds of atheists (65%) oppose it, as do more than half of agnostics (57%). Among those who say their religion is “nothing in particular,” 63% support capital punishment.

Support for the death penalty is consistently higher in online polls than in phone polls. Survey respondents sometimes give different answers depending on how a poll is conducted. In a series of contemporaneous Pew Research Center surveys fielded online and on the phone between September 2019 and August 2020, Americans consistently expressed more support for the death penalty in a self-administered online format than in a survey administered on the phone by a live interviewer. This pattern was more pronounced among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents than among Republicans and GOP leaners, according to an analysis of the survey results .

Phone polls have shown a long-term decline in public support for the death penalty. In phone surveys conducted by Pew Research Center between 1996 and 2020, the share of U.S. adults who favor the death penalty fell from 78% to 52%, while the share of Americans expressing opposition rose from 18% to 44%. Phone surveys conducted by Gallup found a similar decrease in support for capital punishment during this time span.

A majority of states have the death penalty, but far fewer use it regularly. As of July 2021, the death penalty is authorized by 27 states and the federal government – including the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. military – and prohibited in 23 states and the District of Columbia, according to the Death Penalty Information Center . But even in many of the jurisdictions that authorize the death penalty, executions are rare: 13 of these states, along with the U.S. military, haven’t carried out an execution in a decade or more. That includes three states – California , Oregon and Pennsylvania – where governors have imposed formal moratoriums on executions.

A growing number of states have done away with the death penalty in recent years, either through legislation or a court ruling. Virginia, which has carried out more executions than any state except Texas since 1976, abolished capital punishment in 2021. It followed Colorado (2020), New Hampshire (2019), Washington (2018), Delaware (2016), Maryland (2013), Connecticut (2012), Illinois (2011), New Mexico (2009), New Jersey (2007) and New York (2004).

Death sentences have steadily decreased in recent decades. There were 2,570 people on death row in the U.S. at the end of 2019, down 29% from a peak of 3,601 at the end of 2000, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). New death sentences have also declined sharply: 31 people were sentenced to death in 2019, far below the more than 320 who received death sentences each year between 1994 and 1996. In recent years, prosecutors in some U.S. cities – including Orlando and Philadelphia – have vowed not to seek the death penalty, citing concerns over its application.

Nearly all (98%) of the people who were on death row at the end of 2019 were men. Both the mean and median age of the nation’s death row population was 51. Black prisoners accounted for 41% of death row inmates, far higher than their 13% share of the nation’s adult population that year. White prisoners accounted for 56%, compared with their 77% share of the adult population. (For both Black and White Americans, these figures include those who identify as Hispanic. Overall, about 15% of death row prisoners in 2019 identified as Hispanic, according to BJS.)

Annual executions are far below their peak level. Nationally, 17 people were put to death in 2020, the fewest since 1991 and far below the modern peak of 98 in 1999, according to BJS and the Death Penalty Information Center. The COVID-19 outbreak disrupted legal proceedings in much of the country in 2020, causing some executions to be postponed .

Even as the overall number of executions in the U.S. fell to a 29-year low in 2020, the federal government ramped up its use of the death penalty. The Trump administration executed 10 prisoners in 2020 and another three in January 2021; prior to 2020, the federal government had carried out a total of three executions since 1976.

The Biden administration has taken a different approach from its predecessor. In July 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland ordered a halt in federal executions while the Justice Department reviews its policies and procedures.

The average time between sentencing and execution in the U.S. has increased sharply since the 1980s. In 1984, the average time between sentencing and execution was 74 months, or a little over six years, according to BJS . By 2019, that figure had more than tripled to 264 months, or 22 years. The average prisoner awaiting execution at the end of 2019, meanwhile, had spent nearly 19 years on death row.

A variety of factors explain the increase in time spent on death row, including lengthy legal appeals by those sentenced to death and challenges to the way states and the federal government carry out executions, including the drugs used in lethal injections. In California, more death row inmates have died from natural causes or suicide than from executions since 1978, according to the state’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation .

Note: This is an update to a post originally published May 28, 2015.

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John Gramlich is an associate director at Pew Research Center .

Cultural Issues and the 2024 Election

What the data says about crime in the u.s., fewer than 1% of federal criminal defendants were acquitted in 2022, before release of video showing tyre nichols’ beating, public views of police conduct had improved modestly, black americans differ from other u.s. adults over whether individual or structural racism is a bigger problem, most popular.

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Death Penalty in the Philippines: Evidence on Economics and Efficacy

ASOG Working Paper 21-003

27 Pages Posted: 13 Jan 2021

Imelda Deinla

School of Regulation & Global Governance (RegNet)

Ronald U. Mendoza

Ateneo De Manila University - Ateneo School of Government

Angelika Pizarro

Affiliation not provided to ssrn, ray paolo r. santiago.

Ateneo de Manila University - Ateneo Human Rights Center

Date Written: January 10, 2021

In his 5th State of the Nation Address (SONA) last July 27, 2020, President Rodrigo Duterte called on Congress to swiftly pass the bill reinstating the death penalty, specifically for heinous drug-related crimes specified under the Comprehensive Drugs Act of 2002. Pro-death penalty lawmakers and advocates in the country have long argued that the death penalty will deter criminality. However, the literature suggests that there is still no clear and credible empirical evidence to back the argument that the death penalty is a crime deterrent. Furthermore, this paper examined the potential drivers of the growing death penalty support in the Philippines and the possible implications of reinstating the death penalty in the current state of the country’s justice system and economy.

Keywords: death penalty, criminality, selective justice system, human rights

JEL Classification: D63, K14, K38

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

School of Regulation & Global Governance (RegNet) ( email )

Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 0200 Australia

Ronald U. Mendoza (Contact Author)

Ateneo de manila university - ateneo school of government ( email ).

Katipunan Road Loyola Heights Quezon City, 1108 Philippines

Ray Paolo Santiago

Ateneo de manila university - ateneo human rights center ( email ).

20 Rockwell Drive, Ateneo Professional Schools Makati City Philippines

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Expert Commentary

The research on capital punishment: Recent scholarship and unresolved questions

2014 review of research on capital punishment, including studies that attempt to quantify rates of innocence and the potential deterrence effect on crime.

Republish this article

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License .

by Alexandra Raphel and John Wihbey, The Journalist's Resource January 5, 2015

This <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org/criminal-justice/research-capital-punishment-key-recent-studies/">article</a> first appeared on <a target="_blank" href="https://journalistsresource.org">The Journalist's Resource</a> and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.<img src="https://journalistsresource.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/cropped-jr-favicon-150x150.png" style="width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;">

Over the past year the death penalty has again come into focus as a major public policy and political issue, catalyzed by several high-profile events.

The botched execution of convicted murderer and rapist Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma in 2014 was seen as a potential turning point in the debate, bringing increased attention to the mechanisms by which persons are executed. That was followed by a number of other closely scrutinized cases, and the year ended with few executions relative to years past. On December 31, 2014, Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley commuted the sentences of the remaining four prisoners on death row in that state. In 2013, Maryland became the 18th state to abolish the death penalty after Connecticut in 2012 and New Mexico in 2009.

Meanwhile, polling data suggests some softening of public attitudes, though the majority Americans continue to support capital punishment. Gallop noted in October 2014 that the level of public support (60%) is at its lowest in 40 years. A Washington Post -ABC News poll in mid-2014 found that more Americans support life sentences, rather than the death penalty, for convicted murderers. Further, recent polls from the Pew Research Center indicate that only a bare majority of Americans now support capital punishment, 55%, down from 78% in 1996.

Scholarly research sheds light on a number of important aspects of this issue:

False convictions

One key reason for the contentious debate is the concern that states are executing innocent people. How many people are unjustly facing the death penalty? By definition, it is difficult to obtain a reliable answer to this question. Presumably if judges, juries, and law enforcement were always able to conclusively determine who was innocent, those defendants would simply not be convicted in the first place. When capital punishment is the sentence, however, this issue takes on new importance.

Some believe that when it comes to death-penalty cases, this is not a huge cause for concern. In his concurrent opinion in the 2006 Supreme Court case Kansas v. Marsh , Justice Antonin Scalia suggested that the execution error rate was minimal, around 0.027%. However, a 2014 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the figure could be higher. Authors Samuel Gross (University of Michigan Law School), Barbara O’Brien (Michigan State University College of Law), Chen Hu (American College of Radiology) and Edward H. Kennedy (University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine) examine data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Department of Justice relating to exonerations from 1973 to 2004 in an attempt to estimate the rate of false convictions among death row defendants. (Determining innocence with full certainty is an obvious challenge, so as a proxy they use exoneration — “an official determination that a convicted defendant is no longer legally culpable for the crime.”) In short, the researchers ask: If all death row prisoners were to remain under this sentence indefinitely, how many of them would have eventually been found innocent (exonerated)?

Interestingly, the authors also note that advances in DNA identification technology are unlikely to have a large impact on false conviction rates because DNA evidence is most often used in cases of rape rather than homicide. To date, only about 13% of death row exonerations were the result of DNA testing. The Innocence Project , a litigation and public policy organization founded in 1992, has been deeply involved in many such cases.

Death penalty deterrence effects: What do we know?

A chief way proponents of capital punishment defend the practice is the idea that the death penalty deters other people from committing future crimes. For example, research conducted by John J. Donohue III (Yale Law School) and Justin Wolfers (University of Pennsylvania) applies economic theory to the issue: If people act as rational maximizers of their profits or well-being, perhaps there is reason to believe that the most severe of punishments would serve as a deterrent. (The findings of their 2009 study on this issue, “Estimating the Impact of the Death Penalty on Murder,” are inconclusive.) In contrast, one could also imagine a scenario in which capital punishment leads to an increased homicide rate because of a broader perception that the state devalues human life. It could also be possible that the death penalty has no effect at all because information about executions is not diffused in a way that influences future behavior.

In 1978 — two years after the Supreme Court issued its decision reversing a previous ban on the death penalty ( Gregg v. Georgia ) — the National Research Council (NRC) published a comprehensive review of the current research on capital punishment to determine whether one of these hypotheses was more empirically supported than the others. The NRC concluded that “available studies provide no useful evidence on the deterrent effect of capital punishment.”

Researchers have subsequently used a number of methods in an effort to get closer to an accurate estimate of the deterrence effect of the death penalty. Many of the studies have reached conflicting conclusions, however. To conduct an updated review, the NRC formed the Committee on Deterrence and the Death Penalty, comprised of academics from economics departments and public policy schools from institutions around the country, including the Carnegie Mellon University, University of Chicago and Duke University.

In 2012, the Committee published an updated report that concluded that not much had changed in recent decades: “Research conducted in the 30 years since the earlier NRC report has not sufficiently advanced knowledge to allow a conclusion, however qualified, about the effect of the death penalty on homicide rates.” The report goes on to recommend that none of the reviewed reports be used to influence public policy decisions on the death penalty.

Why has the research not been able to provide any definitive answers about the impact of the death penalty? One general challenge is that when it comes to capital punishment, a counter-factual policy is simply not observable. You cannot simultaneously execute and not execute defendants, making it difficult to isolate the impact of the death penalty. The Committee also highlights a number of key flaws in the research designs:

• There are both capital and non-capital punishment options for people charged with serious crimes. So, the relevant question on the deterrent effect of capital punishment specifically “is the differential deterrent effect of execution in comparison with the deterrent effect of other available or commonly used penalties.” None of the studies reviewed by the Committee took into account these severe, but noncapital punishments, which could also have an effect on future behaviors and could confound the estimated deterrence effect of capital punishment.
• “They use incomplete or implausible models of potential murderers’ perceptions of and response to the capital punishment component of a sanction regime”
• “The existing studies use strong and unverifiable assumptions to identify the effects of capital punishment on homicides.”

In a 2012 study, “Deterrence and the Dealth Penalty: Partial Identificaiton Analysis Using Repeated Cross Sections,” authors Charles F. Manski (Northwestern University) and John V. Pepper (University of Virginia) focus on the third challenge. They note: “Data alone cannot reveal what the homicide rate in a state without (with) a death penalty would have been had the state (not) adopted a death penalty statute. Here, as always when analyzing treatment response, data must be combined with assumptions to enable inference on counterfactual outcomes.”

However, even though the authors do not arrive at a definitive conclusion, the National Research Council Committee notes that this type of research holds some value: “Rather than imposing the strong but unsupported assumptions required to identify the effect of capital punishment on homicides in a single model or an ad hoc set of similar models, approaches that explicitly account for model uncertainty may provide a constructive way for research to provide credible albeit incomplete answers.”

Another strategy researchers have taken is to limit the focus of studies on potential short-term effects of the death penalty. In a 2009 paper, “The Short-Term Effects of Executions on Homicides: Deterrence, Displacement, or Both?” authors Kenneth C. Land and Hui Zheng of Duke University, along with Raymond Teske Jr. of Sam Houston State University, examine monthly execution data (1980-2005) from Texas, “a state that has used the death penalty with sufficient frequency to make possible relatively stable estimates of the homicide response to executions.” They conclude that “evidence exists of modest, short-term reductions in the numbers of homicides in Texas in the months of or after executions.” Depending on which model they use, these deterrent effects range from 1.6 to 2.5 homicides.

The NRC’s Committee on Deterrence and the Death Penalty commented on the findings, explaining: “Land, Teske and Zheng (2009) should be commended for distinguishing between periods in Texas when the use of capital punishment appears to have been erratic and when it appears to have been systematic. But they fail to integrate this distinction into a coherently delineated behavioral model that incorporates sanctions regimes, salience, and deterrence. And, as explained above, their claims of evidence of deterrence in the systematic regime are flawed.”

A more recent paper (2012) from the three authors, “The Differential Short-Term Impacts of Executions on Felony and Non-Felony Homicides,” addresses some of these concerns. Published in Criminology and Public Policy , the paper reviews and updates some of their earlier findings by exploring “what information can be gained by disaggregating the homicide data into those homicides committed in the course of another felony crime, which are subject to capital punishment, and those committed otherwise.” The results produce a number of different findings and models, including that “the short-lived deterrence effect of executions is concentrated among non-felony-type homicides.”

Other factors to consider

The question of what kinds of “mitigating” factors should prevent the criminal justice system from moving forward with an execution remains hotly disputed. A 2014 paper published in the Hastings Law Journal , “The Failure of Mitigation?” by scholars at the University of North Carolina and DePaul University, investigates recent executions of persons with possible mental or intellectual disabilities. The authors reviewed 100 cases and conclude that the “overwhelming majority of executed offenders suffered from intellectual impairments, were barely into adulthood, wrestled with severe mental illness, or endured profound childhood trauma.”

Two significant recommendations for reforming the existing process also are supported by some academic research. A 2010 study by Pepperdine University School of Law published in Temple Law Review , “Unpredictable Doom and Lethal Injustice: An Argument for Greater Transparency in Death Penalty Decisions,” surveyed the decision-making process among various state prosecutors. At the request of a state commission, the authors first surveyed California district attorneys; they also examined data from the other 36 states that have the death penalty. The authors found that prosecutors’ capital punishment filing decisions remain marked by local “idiosyncrasies,” meaning that “the very types of unfairness that the Supreme Court sought to eliminate” beginning in 1972 may still “infect capital cases.” They encourage “requiring prosecutors to adhere to an established set of guidelines.” Finally, there has been growing support for taping interrogations of suspects in capital cases, so as to guard against the phenomenon of false confessions .

Related reading: For an international perspective on capital punishment, see Amnesty International’s 2013 report ; for more information on the evolution of U.S. public opinion on the death penalty, see historical trends from Gallup .

Keywords: crime, prisons, death penalty, capital punishment

About the Authors

Alexandra Raphel

John Wihbey

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