The death penalty saves lives

The argument

Before committing a crime, criminals weigh the potential costs and benefits of their actions. If people know that they could lose their lives for crimes, they are less likely to commit them. This idea is known as the deterrence theory. Under this framework, harsh punishment prevents criminal activity. The theory treats offending as a decision rather than as something that simply happens to a person. If a prospective offender compares what an offence might gain against what it might cost, then the severity of the punishment on the other side of that comparison is one of its terms, and raising the severity changes the result for at least some people at the margin. The death penalty represents the upper limit of what a state can impose, so on this reasoning it carries more weight in that calculation than any alternative sentence available to a court. For this reason, we should not abolish the death penalty. Although it is rarely applied, the death penalty's existence deters crime. Rarity of application is not an objection on this account. What does the deterrent work is the knowledge that the penalty is available and can be reached, not the frequency with which courts actually reach it, and abolition would remove that possibility altogether along with the upper end of the scale against which every lesser punishment is measured. If people know that their crimes could lead to their lives being taken, they are more likely to abstain from heinous wrongs. The death penalty ultimately makes our communities safer, because it forces people to consider the potential consequences of their actions, pitting a natural instinct for self-preservation against their desire to commit a crime. That is the mechanism the argument finally rests on: it sets the strongest motive a person has against the motive to offend. In this way, the death penalty saves lives, and the lives it saves are those of the people who would otherwise have been the victims of the crimes that were never committed.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Although this argument seems logical, it wrongly assumes that criminal activity is premeditated and rational. In most cases, people commit heinous crimes while overwhelmed by strong physical impulses such as rage or sexual desire. Crime is carnal. It leaves no room for rational thought. As a result, the criminal will not stop to consider the risk of execution, because carnal impulses leave no room for such consideration. For this reason, the death penalty does not preserve innocent lives.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The model of rational calculation fits acquisitive and planned offending far better than the killings for which capital punishment is actually imposed, which are frequently impulsive, intoxicated or driven by rage. [Rejecting P2] What deters is the perceived certainty and swiftness of being caught rather than the severity of the eventual sentence. A punishment that is, as the argument concedes, rarely imposed and carried out years later is weak on both counts. [Rejecting P3] The empirical claim is where this fails. Comparisons between retentionist and abolitionist jurisdictions have not established a deterrent effect, and a National Research Council review concluded that the existing studies are simply not informative enough to support one.