Capital punishment does not stop murder

JUDGE Richard Johnston’s recent suggestion that the death penalty deters violent crime is wrong.

The most recent comprehensive survey of all research on the relationship between the death penalty and homicide rates, conducted for the UN in 1988 and updated in 2002, concluded that capital punishment does not deter murder any more than life imprisonment.

As Dr Jeffrey Fagan of Columbia University pointed out in 2006: “There is no reliable, scientifically sound evidence that (shows that executions) can exert a deterrent effect.”