Eugene Volokh has upended a hornets' nest with his recent comments on capital punishment. His thoughts on a recent execution in Iran seem to echo those of Larry Niven. In a short story, an extraterrestrial, told that we have laws against cruel and unusual punishment, asks, "what do you do about cruel and unusual crimes?"
And we do have to look at the deterrence effect. At one point, discussing Hitler's hanging of those who were involved in his attempted assassination with piano wire,
Had things been reversed, my regret would have been that hanging with piano wire didn't inflict enough pain on Hitler (though I would have been glad that he hadn't been turned over to a too-"civilized" government that would have dispatched him with less pain).
And the deterrent effect works in many ways, and on many levels. I recently saw (again) an episode of Columbo in which the detective was able to determine who committed a pair of murders. Unfortunately, the murderer had diplomatic immunity. Fortunately, Columbo was able to arrange things so the king of this foreign country was present to overhear the murderer's confession.
The murderer decided that waiving diplomatic immunity and submitting to American justice was far preferable to what he was likely to receive back home.
A fictitious case where deterrence worked has countless parallels in real life. Who knows how many plea bargains are made because a defendant doesn't want to risk drawing the ultimate penalty?
To those who insist that criminals are not sufficiently focused in the future to be deterred by threats of capital punishment, I can only say, tell that to the criminal organizations. They use that same threat to enforce order within their own ranks.
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