Debating the Death Penalty

The American Spectator, a conservative magazine,
recently invited me to debate William Tucker about the death
penalty. Our point/counterpoint, which appeared in the July/August
Spectator, is
now online. Here’s how my side of the dispute begins:

The typical
conservative is well informed about the careless errors routinely
made by the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. Postal Service, and
city hall. If he’s a policy wonk, he may have bookmarked the Office
of Management and Budget’s online list of federal programs that
manage to issue more than $750 million in mistaken payments each
year. He understands the incentives that can make an entrenched
bureaucracy unwilling to acknowledge, let alone correct, its
mistakes. He doesn’t trust the government to manage anything
properly, even the things he thinks it should be
managing.

Except, apparently, the minor matter of who gets to live or die.
Bring up the death penalty, and many conservatives will suddenly
exhibit enough faith in government competence to keep the Center
for American Progress afloat for a year. Yet the system that kills
convicts is riddled with errors.

To read the rest,
follow the link.

Tucker, meanwhile, points out that murder rates rose after
the death penalty was abolished nationwide and fell after “states
started executing people in significant numbers in the 1990s.” But
states that do not have the death penalty have also seen
murder rates decline in the same period—indeed, they’ve
enjoyed a somewhat greater decline—so I’m not convinced he’s found
the reason for the rise and fall.

He also offers an argument about incentives:

For a criminal pulling off a holdup—or a rapist,
or a “surprised” burglar caught by a homeowner—there’s a very
simple logic at work. The victims of your crimes are also the
principal witnesses. They will call the police the minute you
depart. They can identify you. They will probably testify at your
trial. There’s a very simple way to prevent all this: kill
them.

The purpose of the death penalty is to draw a bright line between a
felony and felony murder. If the penalty for rape or robbery is
jail time, and for murder is more jail time after that, there isn’t
a huge incentive to prevent you from pulling the
trigger.

I didn’t mention it in my Spectator piece, but I have
invoked that same bright line elsewhere to show why, if there
is a death penalty, it should not apply to any crime less
serious than murder. If a criminal can be executed for, say,
kidnapping, he may well decide that he might as well kill people to
evade capture, since arrest already means a strong possibility of
being put to death. But while that bright line makes sense as an
argument against a particularly poor way of applying the death
penalty, I don’t think it works as well as an argument for the
death penalty itself. The same incentive, after all, applies to a
murderer: He might decide to kill more people to evade capture
too.

At any rate, you can read both Tucker’s full argument and mine

here, and then you can join the debate yourselves in the
comments.