House of Eratosthenes

Now, we got another occasion for our anti-death-penalty types to learn a thing or two…and nothing happened. Nothing except a bunch of the white coat wearing, clipboard carrying, propeller-beanie scientists putting out one of them smart-college-guy type of reports, and guess what it says?

Studies Say Death Penalty Deters Crime

Anti-death penalty forces have gained momentum in the past few years, with a moratorium in Illinois, court disputes over lethal injection in more than a half-dozen states and progress toward outright abolishment in New Jersey.

The steady drumbeat of DNA exonerations — pointing out flaws in the justice system — has weighed against capital punishment. The moral opposition is loud, too, echoed in Europe and the rest of the industrialized world, where all but a few countries banned executions years ago.

What gets little notice, however, is a series of academic studies over the last half-dozen years that claim to settle a once hotly debated argument — whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder. The analyses say yes. They count between three and 18 lives that would be saved by the execution of each convicted killer.

I would hasten to add, I hope this didn’t chew up a lot of dollars or take a great deal of time.

With the grittiest determination, just how complicated can we make this. I want to kill someone…you take the last guy who killed someone, and re-enact that scene from The Green Mile…I see it…am I deterred or am I not?

But wait. There’s more.

What the death penalty actually is, is pretty easy to figure out. Some guy did something wrong, he went through due process, got his automatic appeals and so forth…he’s alive…you do something to him…he’s dead. Simple. Inwardly, we all understand what’s involved here.

A little bit harder to define, and we touched on this in a previous post, is this thing we call “science” and all the stuff that goes along with that. Research. “Data.” And I find this passage very telling.

The reports have horrified death penalty opponents and several scientists, who vigorously question the data and its implications.

On this weird little planet on which I live, this is the real story. Just who are these “scientists” and how much of a practice have they been making of doing this? I mean, mixing up questions about data with questions about implications of the data. What have they been doing with valid data that present implications they happen to dislike? I mean, they’ve been doing something different with that data, than they do with data that have more palatable implications, right?

I would think, regardless of your feelings about the death penalty, it would behoove you to keep this in mind next time you read a “report” about ethical problems with the death penalty, societies being made safe without a death penalty, etc. etc. etc. We seem to have here a process in which data are dismissed based on the social implications that follow if that data are seriously considered. The article has betrayed this accidentally and mentioned it only in passing…so how many scientists do this, and which ones they are, I cannot say. But this would have to have a contaminating effect on the data that remain, as well as any conclusions that follow.

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For The Anti-Death-Penalty Types XIITuesday, June 12th, 2007

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Tuesday, June 12th, 2007