A new report released confirms what supporters of the death penalty have said all along, namely, that the death penalty deters murder.
A 2003 study he co-authored, and a 2006 study that re-examined the
data, found that each execution results in five fewer homicides, and
commuting a death sentence means five more homicides. "The results are
robust, they don’t really go away," he said. "I oppose the death
penalty. But my results show that the death penalty (deters) — what am
I going to do, hide them?"
So how many lives are being lost through the current de facto moratorium that exists in North Carolina?
OK, fine. Let’s just be dead sure we’re not executing the innocent. They’ve turned up scads of evidence to exonerate people after the fact of their executions (DNA, etc.)