Skashion
Well-Known Member
i kne albert davy said:
You picked the lowest murder rate in the 250 year period of the death penalty, and also the time when the deterrent was very sparingly applied with only a few executions per year in the last decade of its use. That looked like cherry picking to me. A deterrent should be a deterrent quite simply. It shouldn't matter when it's used and its peak effectiveness should coincide with its greatest use and lowest effectiveness with lowest use. The correlation should be clear in order for us to know it's a deterrent. Instead, the inverse relationship was seen indicating it doesn't work as a deterrent. I won't even go into what's wrong with your atomic bomb analogy but you might want to think how mutually assured destruction applies here and think about how different the power relationship is between the state and the person, rather than between two equal states, and also the person and a third-person (i.e. the actual murder victim). That's if you even buy into the idea that mutually assured destruction helped avoid wars. It is pretty demonstrable how they merely sidelined them into proxy conflicts in which many millions of people who had fuck all to do with the US or the USSR died because of conflicts they initiated, supported and provided the arms for, or else happened because countries were arbitrarily divided by the stroke of US and USSR pens leading to wars of reunification. It also assumes that the use of nuclear weapons didn't escalate tensions in the Cold War thus leading to more of those wars. I don't know why people make the assumption that conflict was inevitable between the USSR and the US. The Soviets were not spoiling for a fight with the US. We know this from archival evidence. Mutual distrust and suspicion was a major factor in provoking the Cold War and the western powers concealing the development of nuclear weapons from the Soviets isn't exactly a trust building exercise.
The murder rate for 1965 was 0.68, today it is 0.98, so yes there are more murders than when you happen to choose for your reference point. However in 1952, it was 0.91, so murder rates do vary quite significantly even without what you would call the 'civilised' factor unless of course you are arguing that society became a lot more civilised between 1952 and 1965. However, leaving aside the UK aside for a second, why are you ignoring the evidence from the US? What is it about the American employment of the death penalty that is so different from the UK in the late 1950s and early 60s as to make such a huge difference in its effectiveness as a deterrent?
P.S. No, it was abolished in 1965, an act with a sunset clause is not a suspension. Also why are we arguing about a niggling detail when it means nothing to a deterrence debate. Between 1965 and 1969 you couldn't be given a death sentence. The last executions for murder were in 1964 so 1965 makes sense as the year to use. Also it really really is pointless whether we take 1965 or 1969 as the last year of the death penalty era because the homicide rate was EXACTLY the same at 0.68 in both years.