THE SHORT‐TERM EFFECTS OF EXECUTIONS ON HOMICIDES: DETERRENCE, DISPLACEMENT, OR BOTH?*

AuthorRAYMOND H. C. TESKE,KENNETH C. LAND,HUI ZHENG
Date01 November 2009
Published date01 November 2009
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2009.00168.x
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THE SHORT-TERM EFFECTS OF
EXECUTIONS ON HOMICIDES:
DETERRENCE, DISPLACEMENT, OR
BOTH?*
KENNETH C. LAND
Department of Sociology
Duke University
RAYMOND H. C. TESKE, JR.
College of Criminal Justice
Sam Houston State University
HUI ZHENG
Department of Sociology
Duke University
KEYWORDS: executions, homicides, deterrence, displacement
Does the death penalty save lives? In recent years, a new round of
research has been using annual time-series panel data from the 50 U.S.
states for 25 or so years from the 1970s to the late 1990s that claims to
find many lives saved through reductions in subsequent homicide rates
after executions. This research, in turn, has produced a round of criti-
ques, which concludes that these findings are not robust enough to
model even small changes in specifications that yield dramatically dif-
ferent results. A principal reason for this sensitivity of the findings is
that few state-years exist (about 1 percent of all state-years) in which six
or more executions have occurred. To provide a different perspective,
* Revision of a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Society of
Criminology, Los Angeles, California, November 2, 2006. We thank Jeffrey
Fagan, Frank Zimring, and the anonymous reviewers for useful comments on an
earlier draft of the paper. We also thank Edward Marshall, Assistant Attorney
General for Texas, for his assistance in reviewing the legal cases and legal issues
related to the death penalty in Texas and Lori Kirk, Uniform Crime Report
statistician at the Texas Department of Public Safety, for her assistance in
preparing the homicide data used in the analysis. Direct correspondence to
Kenneth C. Land, Department of Sociology, Duke University, Durham, NC
27708-0088 (e-mail: kland@soc.duke.edu).
2009 American Society of Criminology
CRIMINOLOGY V
OLUME
47 N
UMBER
4 2009 1009
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1010 LAND, TESKE & ZHENG
we focus on Texas, a state that has used the death penalty with sufficient
frequency to make possible relatively stable estimates of the homicide
response to executions. In addition, we narrow the observation intervals
for recording executions and homicides from the annual calendar year
to monthly intervals. Based on time-series analyses and independent-
validation tests, our best-fitting model shows that, from January 1994
through December 2005, evidence exists of modest, short-term reduc-
tions in homicides in Texas in the first and fourth months that follow an
execution—about 2.5 fewer homicides total. Another model suggests,
however, that in addition to homicide reductions, some displacement of
homicides may be possible from one month to another in the months
after an execution, which reduces the total reduction in homicides after
an execution to about .5 during a 12-month period. Implications for
additional research and the need for future analysis and replication are
discussed.
Does the death penalty save lives? This life and death question has stim-
ulated much social science research as well as legal and policy debate in
the United States during the past 50 years. Early on, path-breaking analy-
ses by sociologist Thorsten Sellin (1967) of the history and evolution of
homicide rates in contiguous states from 1920 to 1963 led to doubts about
the deterrent effect of the death penalty. This work supported the waning
reliance on the death penalty in the 1960s as executions virtually ceased
(Donahue and Wolfers, 2005). The U.S. Supreme Court, in its Furman v.
Georgia (1972) decision, ruled that existing death penalty statutes were
unconstitutional.
At about the same time, however, Gary Becker (1968)—who subse-
quently won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his pioneering work on
human capital theory—developed an economic approach to the analysis of
crime and punishment. Becker’s theory emphasized rational choices by
individuals to whom the severity as well as the certainty of punishment
would be salient. This theory gave credibility to the proposition that the
ultimate severe penalty of capital punishment serves as a general deterrent
to homicides. In 1975, Isaac Ehrlich—Becker’s student—published an
analysis of national time-series data on executions and homicides, which
led him to claim that each execution saved eight lives. Ehrlich’s work was
cited to the Supreme Court by Solicitor General Robert Bork a year later,
and the court subsequently upheld various capital punishment statutes in
Gregg v. Georgia (1976) and related cases (Donahue and Wolfers, 2005).
Ehrlich’s work also generated a vigorous academic debate, which lead the
National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to publish a report in 1978 that con-
cluded the existing evidence in support of the deterrent effect of capital
punishment was unpersuasive (Blumstein, Cohen, and Nagin, 1978).
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DETERRENCE, DISPLACEMENT, OR BOTH? 1011
The question of the deterrent effect of capital punishment was not put
to rest by the NAS report. Indeed, this question recently has been
addressed in a new round of research publications by economists (Clon-
inger and Marchesini, 2001; Dezhbakhsh, Rubin, and Shepard, 2003; Ehr-
lich and Liu, 1999; Mocan and Gittings, 2003; Shepherd, 2004;
Zimmerman, 2004). In turn, these articles have been countered by a new
round of critiques (Berk, 2005; Donohue and Wolfers, 2005; Fagan, Zimr-
ing, and Geller, 2006). A rebirth of interest in this controversy also has
been observed among criminologists (Bailey, 1998; Hjalmarsson, 2008;
Sorenson et al., 1999; Stolzenberg and D’Alessio, 2004). At the same time,
although the economists have tended to focus on the national level, recent
research by criminologists has tended to focus on the local level or the
effect of single executions. An earlier exception is the work of Peterson
and Bailey (1991), which was based on national-level data from 1976 to
1987.
What is the outcome of this charge and countercharge exchange? Has
this new round of research and critiques advanced our knowledge, under-
standing, and consensus in regard to the question of whether executions
save lives? Hardly. In their comprehensive review of the early and recent
studies and critiques as well as their own empirical analyses, Donahue and
Wolfers (2005) concluded that estimates of the deterrent effects of execu-
tions are highly sensitive to the model specifications used in the analyses.
Two limitations exist in most prior studies of the deterrent effects of the
death penalty. One is the relative infrequency of application of the death
penalty among the 50 U.S. states in the post-Gregg era. Most states, even
those regions that have employed capital punishment during the past three
decades, have not engaged in a sufficient level or frequency of executions
per year so that stable statistical estimates can be made of deterrent
effects, or lack thereof, at the national level. Indeed, in the post-Gregg era,
a single state—namely Texas—has accounted for approximately one third
of all executions. A second limitation is that the time period of observa-
tions of almost all prior studies is the calendar year, and the unit of analy-
sis is each of the 50 U.S. states. The use of annual data series begs the
question of whether short-term effects of executions on homicides occur.
Annual time-series data make the detection of short-term effects difficult,
because a single event (execution) may occur, for example, in January of
year t, but its relationship to the number of homicides is predicated on
aggregate data that covers a period 12 to 23 months later. In other words,
if the association of executions to homicides is relatively short term, the
effect of an execution in December of year t may influence homicide
events in the subsequent year differently than an execution 11 months ear-
lier in January because of the proximity of the predictor to the outcome
.

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