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FreakonomicsAccording to EhrlichБЂ™s calculation, those 52 additional executions would have accounted for 364 fewer homicides in 2001БЂ”not a small drop, to be sure, but less than 4 percent of the actual decrease in homicides that year. So even in a death penalty advocateБЂ™s best-case scenario, capital punishment could explain only one twenty-fifth of the drop in homicides in the 1990s. And because the death penalty is rarely given for crimes other than homicide, its deterrent effect cannot account for a speck of decline in other violent crimes. It is extremely unlikely, therefore, that the death penalty, as currently practiced in the United States, exerts any real influence on crime rates. Even many of its onetime supporters have come to this conclusion. БЂњI feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed,БЂ«said U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry A. Blackmun in 1994, nearly twenty years after he had voted for its reinstatement. БЂњI no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death.БЂ«So it wasnБЂ™t capital punishment that drove crime down, nor was it the booming economy ...» |
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