DOES the threat of the death penalty discourage potential murderers? Dozens of studies over the past three decades have searched for an answer: yet all of them are flawed.
At least, so concludes a damning report published this week by the US National Research Council, which looked at all of the studies published since the US lifted a four-year ban on the death penalty in 1976. “The unfortunate conclusion is that we can’t learn anything from these studies,” says Charles Manski of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, a member of the report committee.
The report found that none of the…
