Capital punishment as Immoral & Ineffective

With respect to the question of deterrence, Radelet and Akers report on their efforts "to determine if there is consensus among expert criminologists on whether the death penalty has been, is, or could be a general deterrent to criminal homicide." Their conclusions are based on surveys of "67 of the 70 current and former presidents of three professional criminology organizations: The American Society of Criminology, Academy of

Criminal Justice Sciences, and Law and Society Association." They find that

Over 80 percent of these experts believe the existing research fails to support a deterrence justification for capital punishment. . . . In September 1984, all criminologists at the University of Florida released a statement saying that the empirical research on the death penalty did not support the deterrence hypothesis: " . . . As criminologists at [Flo

. . .
because the death penalty is unjustly administered to different murderers. Bedau writes that racial discrimination was one of the bases used by the Supreme Court in ruling the death penalty unconstitutional. Bedau quotes another researcher who wrote in 1944) that "the South makes the widest application of the death penalty, and Negro criminals come in for much more than their share of the executions." Bedau adds, however, that statistics confirm this discrimination, only it is not confined to the South. Between 1930 and 1990, 4,016 persons were executed in the United States. Of these, 2,129 (or 53 percent) were black. For the crime of murder, 3,343 were executed; 1,693 (or 51 percent) were black. During these years AfricanAmericans were about 12 per cent of the nation's population (Bedau). In addition, poverty marks those who are executed: "Approximately ninety percent of those on death row could not afford to hire a lawyer when they were tried" and "A defendant's poverty, lack of firm social roots in the community, inadequate legal representation at trial or on appealall these have been common factors among deathrow populations." Justice William O. Douglas wrote, "One searches our chronicles in vain for the execution of
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