JKSCHW at aol.com wrote:
> When you can't rule out the
> hypothesis that death penalty laws are passed in
> response to a high murder rate, rather than vice
> versa, then you don't even know what the model you're
> testing is, and it's utterly irresponsible to pretend
> that the numbers you're using say anything
> interesting.
The main arguments against the death penalty is the formalizing of death and its deliberate use for repressive purposes (for example, as a "card" in plea bargaining and in corrupting potential witnesses) ("machinery of death" as some Supreme Court justice put it), and that core argument should not be weakened by dependence on challengeable empirical evidence.
Someplace Thoreau remarks apropos of the weakness of examples as evidence that nevertheless a trout in the milk can gives one pause to think. Some years ago I came across the random little factoid that in Louisiana the murder rate went up for about six months after each execution. (Probably executions are coming fast enough now to blur such differences.) It is not evidence (and certainly not proof) of anything, but it should perhaps cause death-penalty advocates to pause and think.
Carrol