National Affairs: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT: A FADING PRACTICE

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In arguing that capital punishment has no deterrent value, its opponents usually appeal to statistics. Often cited is the 1953 report of the British Royal Commission on Capital Punishment, which, after a painstaking statistical study of comparative homicide rates in various countries over the years, concluded that "there is no clear evidence of any influence of the death penalty on the homicide rates." In retorting to the arguments of law-enforcement authorities that the death penalty is needed to keep criminals from killing policemen, abolitionists point to the University of Pennsylvania Criminologist Thorsten Sellin's massive study of fatal attacks on policemen in some 260 Northern U.S. cities. By Sellin's mathematics, the rate of such attacks was slightly higher in death-penalty states than in abolition states.

Against the abolitionists' statistics, defenders of capital punishment appeal to common sense (men fear death, therefore potential murderers must fear the death penalty) and to the opinions of law-enforcement officers (burglars seldom carry guns, and robbers sometimes use unloaded guns, because they do not want to risk killing somebody). Says Los Angeles County Prosecutor Miller Leavy, who argued the state's case against Caryl Chessman back in 1948: "Capital punishment is necessary in our community." In most states of the U.S., it seems, a majority of the legislators agrees with him.