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I'd think that it matters how many innocent people are executed vs how many lives are saved by deterring potential murderers, and my trouble is I don't know how to get those numbers.

I could not disagree with you more! It should not matter how much total good it does if even one person is wrongly killed via the death penalty. It sounds like a logically sound thing until you find yourself being the one person society has decided to kill for the better good of the society.

You find yourself no worse off than the victim of an undeterred murder.

That said, I understand the deterrent effect to be often assumed to be far greater than reality bears out, and I think the death penalty is quite a poor practice on balance for a host of reasons.

Or you just put the blood on the prosecutors hands. If they wrongfully execute someone, then they are the ones to be executed. I guarantee there will be a lot less death penalty cases ;)

Franquin's Idées Noires is one of my all time favourite comics, and one of the one pagers dealt with the death penalty (France still had the death penalty at the time it was first published in Spirou in the last 70's), expressing a similarly effective approach to making it unpalatable.. [1].

A rough translation (my French is rusty - been a decade or two): "The law is clear: Anyone who intentionally kills another will lose their head. Let the executioner do his duty." "This way, my friend" "And so, a good deed done" "I'm sorry, but anyone who intentionally kills another..."

(Idées Noires is fantastic and macabre. Franquin kept "letting" people who causes suffering for other people - or animals - die horrible deaths in his panels, often with a solid dose of poetic justice in between other things, and coupled with rather caustic political commentary. Unfortunately, AFAIK I don't think there is an English translation (one was in the works), but even with quite modest French they're relatively easy to understand (many of them don't have much or any text))

[1] http://www.franquin.com/in/album3_in.php - rightmost panel on the top.

"Or you just..." as opposed to what? I'm not sure how your comment is meant to relate to mine.

It's certainly true that threatening prosecutors with execution in the event of a wrongful execution would stop them from pursuing the death penalty in almost any case. The same is true of a threat of life in prison, and probably also true of substantially lesser sentences.

Let's entertain your idea for a second. If a person wrongfully executed for killing someone, why not continue that process by prosecuting the prosecutor or jury for the wrongful conviction?

I'm not sure what idea of mine is being entertained, here.

I think the real reason that the death penalty is not effective as a deterrent is that the people that murder in general don't think things through. Very reactionary. Obviously there are plenty of cold blooded killers out there too but I doubt penalties have a ton of bearing on things. Most people just don't murder other people. I could be completely off base though and would love to see some evidence either way.

Also, I believe many people don't consider the punishment just the chance of being caught. If you are going to commit a planned murder then you are likely to plan on getting away with it. If it is spur of the moment then again you won't be thinking about being caught or about the punishment...

But you could choose to only apply capital punishment in cases where there was substantial premeditation.

//how many lives are saved by deterring potential murderers

The death penalty isn't about deterrence. It's about vengeance. At least to the family and friends of the victim.

Many in the US, for religious reasons, consider death to be the ultimate punishment. You know - "hell is that way".

But what if you don't believe in hell, or a judgement? Then death is an easy way out. Personally, I'd rather die than be thrown into a hole for 40 years.

So allow me to rephase: //I'd think that it matters how many innocent people are executed vs how many people believe the criminal will suffer in hell.

Either way, i agree.

That makes no sense. If hell is for eternity, why would any religious nut care whether the criminal is executed sooner rather than let to rot and die in prison later? The end result would be the same.

//That makes no sense. If hell is for eternity, why would any religious nut care whether the criminal is executed sooner rather than let to rot and die in prison later

Because they believe hell is more of a punishment. They'd rather see the criminal dead in hell, then sitting in a jail cell alive.

I think he/she meant it as a mathematical argument. Infinity + 20 = Infinity. So if Hell is eternal, it doesn't matter if you get there today or in 20 years.

I think that there's some basis for reading the Bible as saying that the dead don't arrive in heaven/hell until after the second coming occurs.

I just googled this and discovered there's a Christianity Stack Exchange site. Seems to be no strong consensus on exactly when you get to heaven.

Lies, damn lies and statistics.

The Emory study cited by that first article (http://cjlf.org/deathpenalty/DezRubShepDeterFinal.pdf) doesn't inspire me much. Show me an observational study which the researchers claim "eliminates the bias arising from unobserved heterogeneity", and I'll show you a study that was conducted by overconfident researchers who're overselling the strength of their evidence.

And no, after reading the paper I'm not personally convinced that they did deal with unobserved heterogeneity. I'm not even convinced that the authors fully understand what the unobserved heterogeneity problem's really about. They seem to think that it's something you can whisk away by just throwing a bunch of covariates at your data, which is not how it works. If they mentioned their conditional independence assumption, let alone attempted to defend it, I missed it.

Wow. Unless, of course, YOU are the innocent person being executed. Then the comparison doesn't matter at all, doesn't it?

What if you are the innocent person being murdered by someone who would have been deterred by the possibility of capital punishment?

Yeah good point.

I'll be sure to write, "if only the person that stabbed me in this dark alley had the deterrent of possibly being convicted and executed maybe I would still be alive" in blood before I lose consciousness or run out of blood.

That's not the scenario. I'm saying what happens if you are the innocent one being falsely executed.

Why should we think about one scenario but not the other?

Because saying "an innocent person being murdered by someone who..." doesn't make sense. What are they innocent of?

The error in your attempt at utilitarianism is to only count deaths of innocent people as meaningful. It doesn't actually matter whether someone is guilty or innocent when executed, the effect on their family will be precisely the same.

Perhaps it would have been an error in my attempt at utilitarianism, if indeed it were an attempt at utilitarianism; to me however it does matter whether someone is guilty or innocent when executed, and I think it also matters to most people (attempting Rawlsianism?) objecting to my comment on the grounds of any execution of an innocent person being unacceptable. (Can I say that the error in their attempt at Rawlsianism is that they don't also oppose cars which regularly cause deaths of innocent people? I guess I can say it except for the part where I attribute opposition to cars to a philosophy that I never studied in depth.)