The Role of the Press in the Clemency Process

• Author: George Lardner
• Pages: 179-184

Page 179

Let me begin talking about the role of the press in clemency process by saying up front that it sometimes does a lousy job. The press is supposed to be a watchdog. Too often it is a sleeping dog and occasionally just a dumb dog.

Exhibit A, from my newspaper, The Washington Post, ran January 20, 2002, under the headline, "Murderous Pardons?"¹ The only saving grace about the piece was the question mark in the headline. Unfortunately, the article amounted to straight-faced acceptance of a study by economists at the University of Colorado who took a look at death sentences and state homicide rates between 1977 and 1997². They concluded that executions decreased homicides by five to six a year, while every three pardons produced one to one and a half more homicides.

Did the Post talk to any criminologist about this nonsense? Evidently not since the story quoted only the main author of the study. So I talked to a criminologist who is also a senior statistician at the Bureau of Justice Statistics, Patrick Langan. What he pointed out, first of all, was that the authors of the econometric study were economists, not criminologists. What they did, I might add, was build a house of cards, a cockeyed house of cards at that.

First off, they listed about seventeen factors that they said affected the homicide rate, such as unemployment, infant mortality, age of the population and so forth. But there are plenty of other factors that criminologists think are important that they did not count, such as divorce rates, use of illegal drugs, and high rates of abortions. The factors they did count, therefore, were incomplete. Even worse, one key factor, the total number of violent crimes each year, was simply wrong because it used the number of crimes recorded by police. The actual number in the late 1970s, measured by the National Crime Victimization Survey, was twice the number recorded by police. Since police recording has improved there is hardly any difference, but what the study was measuring was not violent crimes, but police recording practices.

The economists also took a look at the number of people leaving death row each year. For instance, in 1997, the last year of the study, they found that 163 people were removed from death row. Seventy- four left because they were executed. Other individuals died of natural causes and others got out because of court rulings. Just three left because of commutations.

From all factors considered, the economists concluded that because there were three pardons in a year (actually commutations), those three "pardons" resulted in an additional homicide. That defies common sense. Page 180

What the economists are saying is that you just learned that someone had been pardoned for a homicide and therefore you felt less at risk in killing your target. So you went ahead and did it.

That is absurd. There is not a shred of evidence that anyone who committed a homicide was aware of a pardon or that people who commit homicides have any awareness of reduced risk.

Now back to what the role of the press should be. Broadly speaking, it is no different from its essential function in every other field: holding people accountable for the power they have or want, in government, or corporations, in labor unions, foundations and other institutions--legal, medical, and yes, journalistic--that have so much sway in American society. This is what is known, quite simply, as watchdog journalism and in a solid news organization, virtually every reporter is engaged in a basic form of "watchdog" work. News, quite simply, is knowledge, knowledge of everyday events that we need to know in order to go about our daily lives, as citizens, as family members, as consumers, what-have-you. Knowledge is power. Governments have power, plenty of it. They would rather not tell the public what they know and how they operate, because the more the average individual knows, the more restrictions we might demand on the excesses or the abuses that...