Book Reviews

Go To Hopkins & Company Homepage

Go to Executive Times Archives

 

Go to 2003 Book Review List

 

Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer’s Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty by Scott Turow

 

Rating: (Recommended)

 

Click on title or picture to buy from amazon.com

 

 

Evolution

Novelist and lawyer Scott Turow presents non-fiction in his new book, Ultimate Punishment: A Lawyer’s Reflections on Dealing with the Death Penalty. In this book, Turow methodically describes how his own position on the death penalty has evolved over the past decade, especially as a result of his own criminal law work and involvement in an Illinois State commission on the death penalty. While my position hasn’t changed as a result of reading Ultimate Punishment, I can appreciate how many readers will be able to watch their positions evolve as they listen to Turow. For those who think about deterrence as the main reason for having the death penalty, here’s Chapter 9, “Deterrence,” (pp. 57-62):

During the third presidential debate in 2000, Jim Lehrer asked both candidates whether they believed the death penalty was a deterrent.

"I do," George W Bush answered, without disagreement from Al Gore. "It's the only reason to be for it."

Mr. Bush, so far as I can tell, was wrong on both scores. There are a number of compelling rationales for capital punishment. And deterrence, upon examination, doesn't appear to be one of them.

When I started my Commission work, I felt that if it could be established that a death sentence, as opposed to life imprisonment, actually deters other people from committing murders, it would have to weigh heavily in any candid assessment of the subject. As a result, I became an unbearable noodge to the Commission's gifted research director, Jean Templeton, who is both a lawyer and a sociologist by training, as I sought her assistance in wading through the learning in this area.

At one point, I even persuaded Jean to undertake a very informal statistical cross-comparison between Illinois and surrounding states. We ended up measuring Illinois against Michigan, and Missouri against Wisconsin, death penalty states versus non-death penalty states, pairs that had similar urban density, racial makeup, and income levels. The murder rates were higher in the death penalty jurisdictions. Indeed, Texas, which has performed more than a third of the executions in the United States since 1976, has a murder rate well above the national average. On the other hand, in the last decade, not only has the consolidated murder rate in states without the death penalty remained consistently lower than in the states that have had executions but the gap has grown wider. As a result, some sociologists have suggested that executions actually inspire murder, a so-called brutalizarion effect, although proof of this point is as generally unavailing as that regarding deterrence, for many of the same reasons.

Statistical  cross-comparisons  between  states  are  inevitably subject to dispute. For example, many of the states that don't have the death penalty didn't have high murder rates to start; thus when murder rates drop, as they have since 1993, there might be a natural tendency for rates in the low states to drop faster. And many statistics can be argued both ways. New York reenacted its death penalty in

September 1995. after the number of murders in the the state had already gone into steep decline. On the other hand, New York's rates have remained low versus other jurisdictions. Is this owing to the death penalty? Proponents usually find the clearest deterrent effect from executions, and there's yet to be one in New York.

Admittedly, you can go dizzy trying to make sense of the numbers and variables, but rigorous study is still not on the side of deterrence. For example, William Bailey and Ruth Peterson, scholars who had yet to close the book on deterrence, nonetheless conceded in 1994: "Deterrence and capital punishment studies have yielded a fairly consistent pattern of non-deterrence." In 1996, Michael Radelet and Ronald Akers published a study in which they asked acknowledged experts—sixty-seven of the current and former presidents of three professional criminology organizations—whether the existing research supported a deterrence justification for capital punishment, without regard to their personal beliefs. Eighty percent said it did not. A

1995 poll by Peter D. Hart Research Associates of 386 police chiefs across the nation found that although the vast majority of them supported the death penalty for philosophical reasons, 67 percent felt it was inaccurate to say that the death penalty significantly reduces the number of homicides.

The principal academic support for deterrence has come from free-market economists, who believe that all social choices are the work of rational decision-makers responding to incentives. The economists, accordingly, have a professional interest in proving that the incrementally more severe punishment represented by the death penalty functions to prevent murder. Led by the pioneering work of Isaac Ehrlich in themis-1970s, these scholars have developed formulas for regression analyses the length of New Jersey, quantifying every conceivable variable. The Nixon administration relied on Ehrlich's results in successfully asking the U.S. Supreme Court to reauthorize capital punishment in 1976. Yet Ehrlich and his followers have been stingingly criticized for methodological and conceptual shortcomings by other scholars, and more recent studies haven't seemed to answer objections. A 2001 paper found a deterrent effect, but the formulas employed also showed that murders are more prevalent in rural areas than in cities, a result that flies in the face of experience.

Nor does the econometric framework fully address fundamental objections to the psychological model being employed. My own impression, based on experience but little social science, is that murder is not a crime committed by those closely attuned to the real-world effects of their behavior. It's characteristic of the criminal offenders I've represented over the years, especially the young and the poor, that many seem unable even to conceive of the future. Instead, killers appear to me to act out a range of narcissistic and infantile impulses—rage, perverted self-loathing, or a grandiose conviction they'll never be caught—in which consequences have no role. Defenders of Ehrlich and his followers adhere to the numbers, lf the data bear them out, they contend—for example, by showing a decline in murders in the wake of executions—their assumptions must be correct.

At the end of the day, the best I could say was this: If the death penalty is a deterrent, that fact is not visible to the naked eye. When you are asking citizens to capitulate to their government's right to kill them, you'd better be able to show them something they can understand in their own terms. Econometric models and regression analyses cannot possibly contribute much to the debate.

There is, of course, another economic argument made in behalf of the death penalty: it saves public funds, because the state does not have to provide lifetime support to an incarcerated killer. But in this, like so many other things, lawyers have a huge impact on costs.

In the United States in 2000, the average period between conviction and execution was eleven and a half years, with lawyers and courts spewing out briefs and decisions all that time. Public funds pay for almost all of this, since capital offenses are most often committed by the poor whose defenses are usually maintained at the cost of the state. There is a lot to pay for. Two lawyers at trial, one on appeal, another for the post-conviction proceedings, another for the habeas. And there must be prosecutors to oppose them, cops and other investigators to put the case in shape for trial, judges to hear the matter, probation officers, mitigation experts, usually a couple of shrinks, court reporters, and transcripts. And none of this considers the costs of incarceration while the convicted defendant is awaiting execution. Those on death row in Illinois and a number of other states are most often held in single cells, since a man with nothing to lose doesn't make an especially good roommate when you aggravate him. Given all those costs, researchers seem to agree that imposing the death penalty is more expensive than leaving a killer alive. A new study published in 2003, which was conducted by the gubernatorial commission in Indiana, concluded that in present values, the costs in death penalty cases exceed the total price of life without parole by more than a third.

Yet cost, I decided ultimately, is basically a red herring. Certainly cost savings don't justify capital punishment. But they do not provide a compelling argument against it, either, in most states. Capital prosecutions are relatively rare. There have been roughly ten to fifteen new death sentences in Illinois every year. Even if we imagine that the costs in those cases exceed those in a non-capital case by a million or even two million dollars, the most grandiose number used by death penalty opponents, the amount saved by abolition is small in terms of a $52.5 billion state budget. The money spent on the death penalty may have high symbolic value, but curtailing that expenditure is certainly not enough to give us a tax cut or better schools.

After two years of reading studies, I decided I wasn't going to find any definitive answers to the merits—or failings—of the death penalty in the realm of social science.

Whether you are in favor of or against the death penalty, you’re likely to find plenty of interest to read in Ultimate Punishment.

Steve Hopkins, November 24, 2003

 

ã 2003 Hopkins and Company, LLC

 

The recommendation rating for this book appeared in the December 2003 issue of Executive Times

URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Ultimate Punishment.htm

 

For Reprint Permission, Contact:

Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park, IL 60302
Phone: 708-466-4650 • Fax: 708-386-8687

E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com

www.hopkinsandcompany.com