Does Capital Punishment Save Lives? An Examination of the Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment

This paper employs fixed and random effects regressions to analyze panel data from the 50 states and Washington, D.C., between the years of 1980 and 2005, to estimate the relationship between the death penalty and homicide rate, and the degree to which this relationship affects crime outcomes. Controlling for a number of economic and demographic characteristics, the results of the fixed and random effects models suggest that there exists a negative, statistically significant relationship between the dependent variable, homicides/100,000 in the population, and the independent variable of interest, the number of executions. The results from an alternative specification, where the independent variable of interest is an execution dummy variable, suggest that it is not the presence of executions that deters homicides, but the actual executions that has a depressing effecting on homicide rate. A final model estimates the relationship between law enforcement officer murders and the number of executions in a given state, in a given year. This model yields shows no statistically significant relationship between the number of executions and the number of law enforcement officer deaths.