The StandDown Texas Project

Shifting American Attitudes on Capital Punishment

Here are two must-read articles.

"U.S. Edges Closer to Europe in Attitude Toward Capital Punishment, Experts Say," is by Brian Knowlton in the New York Times International edition.

Ambivalence about legally administered death, sponsored by the state with bureaucratic detachment but not always precisely carried out, has long run much deeper among Europeans than among Americans, and has led to its abolition or suspension over the past century in nearly all democracies and every European or Central Asian country but Belarus.

Their divergent attitudes toward capital punishment are among the most striking differences between Europe and the United States, where nearly two-thirds of the states still allow the death penalty.

A series of developments have now created new pressure to scale back or eliminate the death penalty in the United States, including problems carrying out executions through lethal injection, convictions that have proved improper, and court fights over whether inmates with limited intellectual capacity should be subject to capital punishment. Last Thursday, a federal judge stayed an execution set for this week in Missouri. Three other executions are scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday in different states.

The question now is whether the United States is at the beginning of a process that will lead it closer to Europe and most other democracies in ending the practice or is just sorting out how to deal with temporary impediments to execution.

At Slate, William Saletan writes, "Are Americans Turning Against the Death Penalty?"  There are infographphics at the link.

For 40 years American politicians have assumed that favoring the death penalty is a winning political position. Is that era coming to an end? Is support for capital punishment, like opposition to gay marriage, evaporating?

We can’t be sure. But we’re seeing the first signs that it could happen.

And:

We got used to high levels of public support for capital punishment in the 1980s and 1990s. But it wasn’t always so: The death penalty was far less favored in the 1950s and 1960s, sometimes lacking majority or even plurality support. The lows we’re seeing today don’t guarantee a further slide—this century’s numbers could bounce around as much as last century’s. But when you look at the array of surveys descending into unfamiliar territory, and when you study the factors behind this descent, it’s reasonable to think it could keep right on going.

You may want to look at recent polling in the public opinion polling category index.

The Economist on America's Death Penalty

"Dismantling the machinery of death," appears in the April 26th print edition of the Economist.

America is unusual among rich countries in that it still executes people. It does so because its politicians are highly responsive to voters, who mostly favour the death penalty. However, that majority is shrinking, from 80% in 1994 to 60% last year. Young Americans are less likely to support it than their elders. Non-whites, who will one day be a majority, are solidly opposed. Six states have abolished it since 2007, bringing the total to 18 out of 50. The number of executions each year has fallen from a peak of 98 in 1999 to 39 last year (see article).

Many people regret this. Some feel that death is the only fitting punishment for murderers: that it satisfies society’s need for retribution. Some find a religious justification, such as the line in Exodus that calls for: “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth”. Such appeals to emotion or faith are hard to answer, although the Bible also has passages about not casting the first stone, and many conservative evangelicals have ended up in the odd position of prizing life when it comes to abortion, but not when it comes to prisoners (the Catholic church is pro-life on both counts). However, in a secular democracy a law of such gravity must have some compelling rational justification, which the death penalty does not.

"The slow death of the death penalty," is the post on the Economist website.

Several factors have driven death sentences and executions down. The simplest may be that America’s homicide rate has declined sharply—from 10.2 per 100,000 people in 1980 to 4.7 in 2012. With that broader decline has come a fall in the most heinous murders; ie, the sort that earn the harshest sentences. As Bob McCulloch, prosecuting attorney for St Louis County, explains: “In Missouri, most [murders] are second-degree…bar-room brawls, or some guys shooting each other over a bad dope deal.” First-degree murders, he says, “rape and murder, killing a police officer—those are all way down.”

Another shift is that most juries can now impose sentences of life without the possibility of parole. In 1972, when the Supreme Court suspended the death penalty (it was reinstated four years later), only seven states allowed such sentences. Now every state bar Alaska gives juries the option of making sure that a murderer will never be released (perhaps to kill again) without actually killing him.

That makes them warier of the needle. Texas, for instance, introduced life-without-parole sentences in 2005. “When that happened,” says Craig Watkins, district attorney for Dallas County, the state’s second-most populous county, “you saw a decrease in prosecutors even bringing death-penalty cases...Now you have a choice. Before, you didn’t.” And indeed, Texas sentences fewer people to death now (nine in 2013) than in 2004 (23).

New Hampshire Commentary

"Death penalty solves nothing, former N.H. Supreme Court justices write," is the OpEd by Joseph Nadeau and John Broderick, at SeaCoast Online.  Both are former justices on the New Hampshire Supreme Court; Broderick is a former chief justice.

New Hampshire has not executed anyone for three quarters of a century. Yet, it registered the second lowest murder rate in the nation every year of this century. Our state is regularly ranked one of the safest in which to live; and by reported crime statistics was the safest in 2008, 2009 and 2010. The time has come to embrace New Hampshire history and abolish the death penalty.

There is no relationship between the death penalty and protection from murderers. Louisiana, a state with 28 executions since 1975, has had the highest murder rate in the nation every year since 1996. Mississippi, with 21 executions, was either second or third during that period. The other states with the lowest murder rates — Hawaii, Vermont, Minnesota, Rhode Island and Iowa — have no death penalty.

We do not doubt that those who support capital punishment do so from a sense of outrage at the horror of murder, and in the belief that executions serve a necessary purpose. We share that outrage, but for us the question must be asked: What purpose is served by executions?

And:

Eliminating state executions says nothing about criminals who kill, but it says a great deal about a society that does not. For us, the principle for any killing is the same: The intentional taking of human life, except in self-defense or in the defense of others, is not acceptable no matter who does the killing. Abolishing the death penalty will not compromise public safety, but it may replace rage with reason, retribution with self-respect, and enrich the character of our people as a whole.

Earlier coverage from New Hampshire begins at the link.  The state's repeal legislation is expected to be heard by a Senate committee next week.  It has already passed the House.

An End to Death Row?

That's the title of an editorial published in today's Washington Post.  It begins the latest round of coverage of the DPIC annual report.  Here's an excerpt:

The Death Penalty Information Center and other capital-punishment foes attribute the death penalty’s decline to waning public support amid concerns about possibly innocent defendants on death row and other flaws in the system. This is part of the story, but the decline in capital punishment also reflects the decline in commissions of the crime for which it is most often imposed: murder. The national murder rate in 2012, 4.7 per 100,000 population, was among the lowest recorded since 1963. Fewer murder cases mean fewer potential death sentences. In a safer society, there is less of the fear that often drives demand for harsh punishments. The rate at which U.S. juries sentence defendants to death has fallen from its post-1976 peak of 17.8 per 1,000 murders, in 1999, to 5.1 per 1,000 murders in 2013 — a 71 percent decline. Meanwhile, the murder rate dropped 25 percent during that time.

Supporters and opponents of capital punishment alike have reason to applaud the remarkable reductions in homicide, and other violent crime, that this country and its law enforcement agencies have achieved in the past quarter-century. Preliminary estimates from such cities as Chicago and Philadelphia, which are on course to record the fewest homicides this year since 1965 and 1967, respectively, suggest that 2013 brought further progress.

The Week reports, "The death penalty is going out of style," by Carmel Lobello.

It has been a slow year for state-sanctioned death.

In the U.S., there were just 39 executions in nine states this year, a 10 percent drop from 2012, and only the second time in the past 19 years the number has fallen below 40, the Death Penalty Information Center reported earlier this month. Judges handed down more than 80 death sentences, nearly the lowest number since 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the death penalty. In comparison, the number of sentences in 1996 was 315.

As the number of state-mandated killings has fallen, so has public support for them. A Gallup poll published this year shows that in 2013, support for capital punishment reached its lowest level in 40 years — down to 60 percent, compared with 80 percent in 1994. In addition, 52 percent of those surveyed said they believe the death penalty is used unfairly, down from 58 percent in 2010, and 60 percent in 2006.

"No executions in SC for more than 2 years," is the AP report from South Carolina by Meg Kinnard.  It's via the Spartanburg Herald Journal.

For the second year in a row, South Carolina saw no executions in 2013. The state had no new death sentences in the last year, either.

It's a downward trend that mirrors national patterns that are moving away from putting inmates to death. In a report that came out this month, the Death Penalty Information Center said that fewer and fewer people are being executed nationwide.

And:

At the end of June 2005, there were 72 people awaiting execution in South Carolina. Since then, there have been fewer than a dozen, and several inmates have left death row after winning appeals that ended in their sentences being overturned.

Forty-six inmates are on South Carolina's death row, all men who range in age from 30 to 69 years old, according to the state Department of Corrections.

South Carolina's last execution came in May 2011, when 36-year-old Jeffrey Motts was put to death by injection for strangling his cellmate.

In North Carolina, the Wilmington Star News reports, "Goolsby pushes forward with effort restart death penalty," by Molly Parker.

An annual national study recently released shows states declined use of the death penalty while Sen. Thom Goolsby, R-New Hanover, pushes for North Carolina to rejuvenate it in this state that has seen a seven-year moratorium due to legal tangles.

"I have spent a great deal of time with the families of murder victims," said Goolsby, who is expected to face several challengers to the left in next year's elections. "I have felt their pain and seen their endless tears. For me it is very simple: Cold-blooded, first-degree murderers deserve the death penalty, and the families of murder victims deserve closure."

And:

Though it's unclear how or if Goolsby's efforts will restart the death penalty – that change itself is likely to get tangled in legal battles – a topic as emotional and divisive as this could become a wedge issue in his re-election bid next year.

Goolsby is joined by many of his fellow conservative Republicans in his push, but nationally the country seems to be moving in the opposite direction, some experts contend.

Earlier coverage of the DPIC report begins at the link; it also begins in North Carolina.

The Death-Penalty Debate Represents a Market Failure

That's the title of a column at Bloomberg News View, written by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers on the recent deterrence study published by the National Reserach Council.  Stevenson and Wolfers are professors at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.  Here's an extended excerpt from the beginning of the essay.  There are graphs at the link.

The debate over the death penalty offers a vivid illustration of a tragic flaw in the market of ideas: Strong beliefs attract a lot more attention, and can have a lot more influence, than the truth.

In recent years, five U.S. states have eliminated capital punishment, and several others are currently reconsidering their policies. Advocates of the death penalty insist the moves will lead to more murders. They point to a number of studies conducted over the past couple of decades that purport to find clear evidence supporting their view. Experts happily serve up unequivocal congressional testimony, and feed their analyses to lobby groups.

The reality, unsatisfying and inconvenient as it may be, is that we simply don’t know how capital punishment affects the homicide rate. That’s the conclusion of the National Academy of Sciences, which typically plays the role of impartial arbiter in these social-science debates. Their expert panel recently concluded that existing research “is not informative about whether capital punishment decreases, increases, or has no effect on homicide rates,” and that such studies “should not influence policy judgments about capital punishment.”

The panel’s conclusions largely echo those from research conducted by one of us (Justin Wolfers) jointly with Stanford University law professor John Donohue. That research replicated and probed the leading studies, finding that even minor changes in how the analyses were conducted dramatically altered the conclusions. As a result, there’s “not just ‘reasonable doubt’ about whether there is any deterrent effect of the death penalty, but profound uncertainty,” the authors wrote. Indeed, “we remain unsure even of whether” the effects “are positive or negative.”

How could the confident claims of those earlier researchers end up being so wrong? Let’s start by exploring why it’s so difficult to give a precise answer to those interested in the effects of the death penalty.

As big a deal as capital punishment may seem, it’s actually quite rare. Since the death penalty was reinstated in the U.S. in 1976, there have been about 670,000 homicides and only 1,296 executions, a rate of about one execution per 500 murders. This makes the task of discerning its specific impact very difficult.

To complicate things further, the homicide rate fluctuates enormously for reasons unrelated to capital punishment. So the correlation between capital punishment and homicide rates can be positive or negative, depending on the specific sample of states or countries analyzed, the sample period chosen, and which other determinants are accounted for.

Even if the correlation between capital punishment and murder rates could be reliably estimated, that wouldn’t be enough to prove causation. For instance, more vigorous capital punishment probably occurs at the same time as other reforms to sentencing, prisons and policing. Unless these variables are measured accurately -- and our existing criminal-justice statistics do not provide adequate measures -- it is impossible to disentangle which reforms are driving the homicide rate.

The Bloomberg column is noted at the Wall Street Journal Real Time Economics blog.

Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers look at the problems of measuring the effectiveness of the death penalty. “As big a deal as capital punishment may seem, it’s actually quite rare. Since the death penalty was reinstated in the U.S. in 1976, there have been about 670,000 homicides and only 1,296 executions, a rate of about one execution per 500 murders. This makes the task of discerning its specific impact very difficult. To complicate things further, the homicide rate fluctuates enormously for reasons unrelated to capital punishment.

Earlier coverage of the NRC deterrence study begins at the link.

Opinion Roundup

West Virginia's Charleston Gazette carries the editorial, "Pro-death: Ugly spectacle," today.

The death penalty degrades any society that inflicts it. States that kill people are less humane. Texas is almost the world capital of executions, and former Gov. George W. Bush boasted of his large number of termination warrants. He even mocked a woman who was put to death.

Now another Texas case from just before Bush's tenure -- evidently the erroneous execution of an innocent man -- is spotlighted in a book-length report in Columbia University's Human Rights Law Review. The account by Columbia law professor James Liebman says:

Carlos DeLuna was a young parolee with the mental level of a child. One night in 1983, DeLuna said, he saw a thug he knew stab a Corpus Christi store clerk to death with a lock-blade buck knife. As sirens approached, DeLuna ran, fearful of police.

When he was found hiding under a pickup truck a mile away, DeLuna had no blood on him, even though the murder scene was soaked with blood as the female clerk wrestled with the killer.

And:

Liebman concludes that the low-IQ DeLuna almost certainly was wrongly executed for someone else's murder. But we wonder whether Texas officials really care, in a state where prejudice against Hispanics is strong.

This fall, Californians will vote in an attempt to ban the death penalty. We certainly hope they take the humanitarian step that West Virginia took a half-century ago. We're proud that the Mountain State stopped killing prisoners.

Pro-death sentiment is held chiefly by hard-right conservative Americans. But we wonder if they, too, are beginning to lose their desire for executions.

Most modern democracies have ended the barbaric, medieval practice of putting people to death. It's a brutal remnant from the dark past. Where it remains, it's inflicted almost entirely on the poor and downgraded minorities. It doesn't belong in any advanced, educated, fair society.

Earlier coverage of the Columbia Human Rights Law Review article begins at the link; also available, earlier coverage of the SAFE California ballot initiative.  You can read the complete Columbia Human Rights Law Reviewl article at The Wrong Carlos.

Illinois attorney Spencer Aronfeld posts, "How Florida's Death Penalty Is Killing Us," at Huffington Post.  Here's the beginning:

Since 1979 Florida has executed 72 human beings. Most spent more than a decade on death row waiting to be killed. According to the Florida Department of Corrections the average death row inmate is 44 years old at the time of his execution, while they were only 30 years of age at the time of the alleged offense that led to their conviction.

Florida also executes women. Judy Bunoano was the first woman Florida executed in 1998. She died in an electric chair. Currently there are four women on death row.

After Bunonano's execution, Florida started offering lethal injections as an optional means. The executions are performed by an unnamed "private citizen" that gets paid $150.00 for each execution.

Tragically, not everyone who has been on Florida's death row was actually guilty. In fact, Florida reverses more death sentences than any other state in the country, releasing 23 death row inmates based upon post-conviction evidence of their innocence.

Now is the time that Florida must reform its criminal justice system by taking a closer look at what Florida's death penalty says about us as a civilization, as well as the 401 people who are currently on Florida's death row. Some argue and believe that having Florida's death penalty somehow discourages murder. Yet, the statistics tell another story. For instance, in 2010 the average murder rate in states with death penalties was 4.6 per 100,000 while the average murder rate for states without the death penalty was only 2.9 per 100,000.

More on Florida death penalty issues at the links.

Current Research Not Sufficient to Assess Deterrent Effect of the Death Penalty

That's the title of a news release issued by the National Research Council announcing a major study capital punishment and deterrence.  Here's the full text of the news release:

Research to date on the effect of capital punishment on homicide rates is not useful in determining whether the death penalty increases, decreases, or has no effect on these rates, says a new report from the National Research Council.  The committee that wrote the report evaluated studies conducted since a four-year moratorium on the death penalty was lifted in 1976, and it found that the studies do not provide evidence for or against the proposition that the death penalty affects homicide rates.  These studies should not be used to inform judgments about the effect of the death penalty on homicide, and should not serve as a basis for policy decisions about capital punishment, the committee said.

The lack of evidence about the deterrent effect of capital punishment -- whether it is positive, negative, or zero -- should not be construed as favoring one argument over another, the report stresses.  "Fundamental flaws in the research we reviewed make it of no use in answering the question of whether the death penalty affects homicide rates," said Daniel S. Nagin, Teresa and H. John Heinz III University Professor of Public Policy and Statistics at Carnegie Mellon University Pittsburgh, and chair of the committee that wrote the report. "We recognize that this conclusion may be controversial to some, but no one is well-served by unsupportable claims about the effect of the death penalty, regardless of whether the claim is that the death penalty deters homicides, has no effect on homicide rates or actually increases homicides."

The key question, the report says, is whether capital punishment is less or more effective as a deterrent than alternative punishments, such as a life sentence without the possibility of parole.  Yet none of the research that has been done accounted for the possible effect of noncapital punishments on homicide rates.

The committee also found that studies made implausible or unsupported assumptions about potential murderers' perceptions of and response to capital punishment.  Many studies did not address how perceptions are formed and simply inferred that potential murderers respond to the objective risk of execution. This inference ignores the fact that determining the objective risk poses great complexities even for a well-informed researcher, let alone a potential murderer.  For instance, only 15 percent of people who have been sentenced to death since 1976 have actually been executed, and a large fraction of death sentences are reversed.  Furthermore, estimates of the deterrent effect of the death penalty were based on unfounded assumptions, for example, that the effect of capital punishment is the same across all the states and over time.  There is no evidence to support such suppositions.

These intrinsic shortcomings severely limit what can be learned from the existing research, the report says.  The committee recommended next steps for research that include collecting data that consider both capital and noncapital punishments for murder, conducting studies on how potential murderers perceive a range of punishments in homicide cases, and using statistical methods based on more credible assumptions about the effect of capital punishment on homicide rates.

The ultimate success of the research may depend on the specific questions being addressed, the report adds.  Questions of interest include if and how the legal status or intensity of use of the death penalty affects homicide rates or whether executions affect these Rrates in the short term.  The report acknowledged that new data and knowledge may not come quickly or easily, but such research may help to provide insight into the crime prevention effects of noncapital punishment that could be useful for future policy decisions.

The committee was not asked and did not investigate the moral arguments for or against capital punishment, the empirical evidence on whether capital punishment is administered in a nondiscriminatory and consistent fashion, or the cost of its administration.

The study was sponsored by Tides Foundation, the Proteus Action League, and the National Institute of Justice.  The National Academy of Sciences, National Academy of Engineering, Institute of Medicine, and National Research Council make up the National Academies.  They are private, nonprofit institutions that provide science, technology, and health policy advice under a congressional charter.  The Research Council is the principal operating agency of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering.

The members of the NRC review committee are listed on the release, as well as other information.

Prepublication information for Deterrence and the Death Penalty is also available.

Here'a roundup of the initial news coverage:

"Report: Deterrent effect of death penalty unclear," is the AP filing.  It's also available from ABC News and CBS News.

A new report says there is no reliable research on whether the death penalty has any effect on the murder rate, more than 35 years since the Supreme Court allowed the resumption of executions in the United States.

The National Research Council report says all the studies on the possible deterrent effect of the death penalty suffer from fundamental flaws. The report identifies problems that include not taking account of the effects of alternatives to death sentences or insufficiently weighing how killers assess the risk of execution.

The authors of the new report say they are disappointed to reach the same conclusion as a 1978 study. They say their evaluation of the existing research does not favor either side in the long-running debate about deterrence and the death penalty.

"Does the Death Penalty Deter Crime? Studies are Inconclusive," at National Journal.

We still don’t know enough about whether the death penalty works to deter crime, and policymakers should ignore research that claims to say whether it does, the National Academy of Sciences said on Wednesday.

A panel of experts appointed by the independent, nonprofit academy reviewed more than 30 years of research done since the 1976 Supreme Court decision that reinstated the death penalty as constitutional.

“The studies have reached widely varying, even contradictory, conclusions. Some studies conclude that executions save large numbers of lives; others conclude that executions actually increase homicides; and still others conclude that executions have no effect on homicide rate,” according to the academy panel, chaired by Daniel Nagin, an expert in criminology and statistics at Carnegie Mellon University.

And:

The report turns up some interesting facts – for instance, only 15 percent of people who have been sentenced to death since 1976 have actually been executed.

"NRC: Death penalty effect research 'fundamentally flawed'," by Dan Vergano at USA Today.

Does the death penalty deter murderers? Criminology offers no answers, despite more than three decades of research, concludes an expert panel, reviewing studies of the deterrence effects of capital punishment.

In 1976, the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty as the law of the land. Since then, 1,234 people have been executed in U.S. prisons, where 35 states apply the death penalty.

So, does it help lower the homicide rate? Who knows. Research looking into links between capital punishment and murder rates is "fundamentally flawed," concludes a National Research Council panel led by criminologist Daniel Nagin of Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

"One major deficiency in all the existing studies is that none specify the non-capital sanction components of the sanction regime for the punishment of homicide," says the panel's just-released report, such as life imprisonment. As well, "incomplete or implausible models of potential murderers' perceptions," confound the studies, making them suspect.

"We recognize this conclusion will be controversial to some, but nobody is well served by unfounded claims about the death penalty," Nagin said, in a telephone briefing for reporters. "Nothing is known about how potential murderers actually perceive their risk of punishment."

Related posts are in the deterrence category index.

Even as Violent Crime Falls, Killing of Officers Rises

That's the title of a report in today's New York Times written by Michael S. Schmidt and Joseph Goldstein.

As violent crime has decreased across the country, a disturbing trend has emerged: rising numbers of police officers are being killed.

According to statistics compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, 72 officers were killed by perpetrators in 2011, a 25 percent increase from the previous year and a 75 percent increase from 2008.

The 2011 deaths were the first time that more officers were killed by suspects than car accidents, according to data compiled by the International Association of Chiefs of Police. The number was the highest in nearly two decades, excluding those who died in the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001 and the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.

While a majority of officers were killed in smaller cities, 13 were killed in cities of 250,000 or more. New York City lost two officers last year. On Sunday, four were wounded by a gunman in Brooklyn, bringing to eight the number of officers shot in the city since December.

And:

After a spate of killings in early 2011, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. asked federal authorities to work with local police departments to try to come up with solutions to the problem.

The F.B.I., which has tracked officer deaths since 1937, paid for a study conducted by John Jay College that found that in many cases the officers were trying to arrest or stop a suspect who had previously been arrested for a violent crime.

That prompted the F.B.I. to change what information it will provide to local police departments, the officials said. Starting this year, when police officers stop a car and call its license plate into the F.B.I.’s database, they will be told whether the owner of the vehicle has a violent history. Through the first three months of this year, the number of police fatalities has dropped, though it is unclear why.

Some law enforcement officials believe that techniques pioneered by the New York Police Department over the past two decades and adopted by other departments may have put officers at greater risk by encouraging them to conduct more street stops and to seek out and confront suspects who seem likely to be armed.

Last Friday, Austin Police Officer Jaime Padron was fatally shot while investigating an overnight call.  The Austin American-Statesman has more on that case in, "Man charged with capital murder in officer's shooting death," by Tony Plohetski, Patrick George and Claudia Grisales.

Related posts are in the crime rates and law enforcement indexes.

The Illinois Repeal

"Abolishing death penalty was right choice for state," is an OpEd by Charles W. Hoffman for the Chicago Sun-Times.  It appeared in the Sunday edition.  He's an assistant defender in the Office of the Illinois State Appellate Defender, who has argued death penalty appeals before the Illinois Supreme Court.

One year ago this Friday, Gov. Pat Quinn signed legislation abolishing the death penalty in Illinois.

The rightness of that decision is more clear than ever. Violent crime rates have not climbed. The public is no less safe. And the pursuit of justice has been served, not undermined.

Although hundreds of convicted murderers had been sent to Death Row since Illinois reinstated capital punishment in 1977, only 12 men had been executed in the 34 years the death penalty law was on the books. Yet during that same period, 20 innocent men were convicted of murder and sentenced to death, only to be exonerated after spending decades in prison facing execution for crimes they didn’t commit.

The last execution in Illinois took place in 1999, one year before former Gov. George Ryan declared a moratorium on the death penalty, as the only way to avoid what he termed “the ultimate nightmare” of the state wrongfully executing an innocent person. That moratorium remained in effect until capital punishment finally, and officially, ended last year.

Death penalty proponents had long argued that capital punishment was necessary to deter murders. But no evidence ever supported such an argument. In fact, in the year since abolition, the Chicago Police Department reports that the murder rate in the city remains at a 40-year low.

And:

Our system of capital punishment was abolished because it was broken beyond repair, infected with racism and inherently arbitrary and prone to mistakes. There is no doubt we’re better off without the death penalty, both morally and fiscally.

The first anniversary of the abolition of that barbaric practice in Illinois is a joyous, and yet somber, occasion, which gives us all the opportunity to reflect on the profound fact that we, as a sovereign state, no longer kill people to show that killing people is wrong.

Coverage of Illinois' repeal of capital punishment begins at the link; coverage of the costly last Illinois capital prosecution is also available.  Related posts are in the abolition and OpEd indexes.

U.S. Violent Crime Continues Downward Trend

The FBI Uniform Crime Report on Violent Crime for 2010 is available.

"FBI: violent crime down by 6 percent last year," is the FBI filing by Pete Yost.

Violent crime dropped 6 percent in 2010, marking the fourth straight year of year-to-year declines, while property crime was down for the eighth straight year, falling 2.7 percent, the FBI reported Monday.

Nationwide, there were an estimated 1.2 million violent crimes in 2010 and an estimated 9 million property crimes.

An aging population and continued high rates of imprisonment for criminals are helping to drive down crime rates, said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University.

CNN posts, "FBI: 2010 sees further decline in violent crime,"  It's by Terry Frieden.

Violent crime in the United States declined 6.5% last year, according to statistics the FBI released Monday.

The 2010 figures, based on reports from thousands of police agencies from coast to coast, reflect a continuing decline in violence over the last several years despite difficult economic conditions.

The figures released the previous year showed a drop of 5.3% in total violent crime from 2009. Not since 2006, when crime was up 1.9%, has there been a brake on the decline in violence. From 1997 to 2006, violent crime dropped a total of 13%.

This past year the closely watched murder rate dropped 4.8%. Aggravated assaults were down 4.7%, rape declined 5.5% and robbery dropped 10.5%.

"Violent US crime falls for 4th year in a row: FBI," at AFP.

Attorney General Eric Holder said the new figures showed that federal law enforcement agencies had made progress on the crime fighting priorities of President Barack Obama's administration.

"We've targeted gang leadership in communities from Florida to New York, and from Tennessee to North Carolina," he said in a statement. "We've renewed our commitment to fighting organized crime, whether it is traditional La Cosa Nostra or Mexican drug cartels."

But the report also shows that last year's drop in violent crime is part of a long-term trend with the number of such cases falling each year since 2006.

"When considering 5- and 10-year trends, the 2010 estimated violent crime total was 13.2 percent below the 2006 level and 13.4 percent below the 2001 level," the report said.

There were an estimated 1,246,248 violent crimes nationwide last year, down 6.0 percent from 2009, according to the FBI figures.

The violent crime rate for 2010 was 403.6 offenses per 100,000 inhabitants, a 6.5 percent decrease from the 2009 rate. The property crime rate was 2,941.9 offenses per 100,000 persons, down 3.3 percent from 2009.

And:

Aggravated assault accounted for 62.5 percent of violent crimes reported to authorities, followed by robberies at 29.5 percent. Six percent of the violent crimes reported were rapes, and 1.2 percent murders.

Firearms were used in more than two-thirds murders committed, more than 40 percent of robbers, and one in five assaults, the report said.

Related posts are in the crime rates index.

Richard Florida on the Crime Rate

"Don't Fear the City: Urban America's Crime Drops to Lowest in 40 Years," is the title of his post at the Atlantic.  Florida is the Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto.

The long-held image of violent, crime-filled cities permeates popular culture. Thanks to TV shows, rap music, and a deep-seated antipathy to cities that has been apparent in some political and cultural quarters since at least the nineteenth century, countless Americans continue to perceive big cities through the lens of 40-year-old movies like Taxi Driver and The Out of Towners -- as cauldrons of crime, filth, and corruption (and magnets for immigrants, gays, Jews, intellectuals, and other "disreputable" minorities).

The past couple of decades have seen a powerful back-to-the-city movement that has transformed many once-notorious districts into residential quarters and high-end shopping districts. Times Square, a byword for crime and urban decay, has become a Disney-like tourist magnet, and parts of Herald Square, the heart of NYC's feared Tenderloin district a century ago, have been closed to traffic and filled with tables and chairs. Clearly something must be happening with urban crime. Crime -- both property crime and violent crime -- is down to its lowest level in 40 years, especially in America's biggest cities, according to newly released data from the FBI's annual Uniform Crime Report.

And:

Even more striking is the trend in violent crime, which is also down substantially in big cities. These crimes against people, which include murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, fell 5.1 percent in big cities with more than 1 million people. That's better than the decline for the smallest communities, with populations under 10,000 (4.3 percent), and only slightly off the national average.

The report notes that law-enforcement agencies provide the figures voluntarily and cautions against making city-to-city or agency-to-agency comparisons, which could "lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses that often create misleading perceptions adversely affecting communities and their residents." Nor does the report venture any guesses as to the cause of the downward trend.

But one factor frequently cited by criminologists is demographics. Crimes are more likely to be committed by young people, so the crime rate drops when the cohort of young people shrinks, as it has in the past few years. Better policing surely helps too, as has urban revitalization, which is bringing relatively prosperous singles, couples, families, and empty nesters into neighborhoods that had been in decline in years past, improving neighborhood quality and safety. We'll be taking a closer look at the social, geographic, demographic, and economic factors associated with crime across America's cities in a future post.

News coverage of the FBI report is in the preceding post; related posts are in the crime rates index.

Violent Crime's Downward Trend

The FBI released its Preliminary Annual Uniform Crime Report, 2010, yesterday. 

"Steady Decline in Major Crime Baffles Experts," is the report in today's New York Times.  It's written by Richard Oppel Jr.

The number of violent crimes in the United States dropped significantly last year, to what appeared to be the lowest rate in nearly 40 years, a development that was considered puzzling partly because it ran counter to the prevailing expectation that crime would increase during a recession.

In all regions, the country appears to be safer. The odds of being murdered or robbed are now less than half of what they were in the early 1990s, when violent crime peaked in the United States. Small towns, especially, are seeing far fewer murders: In cities with populations under 10,000, the number plunged by more than 25 percent last year.

And:

Criminology experts said they were surprised and impressed by the national numbers, issued on Monday by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and based on data from more than 13,000 law-enforcement agencies. They said the decline nationally in the number of violent crimes, by 5.5 percent, raised the question, at least in some places, of to what extent crime could continue to fall — or at least fall at the same pace as the past two years. Violent crimes fell nearly the same amount in 2009.

“Remarkable,” said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University. “Given the fact that we have had some healthy declines in recent years, I fully expected that the improvement would slow. There is only so much air you can squeeze out of a balloon.”

There was no immediate consensus to explain the drop. But some experts said the figures collided with theories about correlations between crime, unemployment and the number of people in prison.

Take robbery: The nation has endured a devastating economic crisis, but robberies fell 9.5 percent last year, after dropping 8 percent the year before.

“Striking,” said Alfred Blumstein, a professor and a criminologist at the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University, because it came “at a time when everyone anticipated it could be going up because of the recession.”

Nationally, murder fell 4.4 percent last year. Forcible rape — which excludes statutory rape and other sex offenses — fell 4.2 percent. Aggravated assault fell 3.6 percent. Property crimes — including burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft and arson — fell 2.8 percent, after a 4.6 percent drop the year before.

The AP report is, "FBI: 5.5 percent drop in violent crime," by Pete Yost.  It's via CBS News.

Crime levels fell across the board last year, extending a multi-year downward trend with a 5.5 percent drop in the number of violent crimes in 2010 and a 2.8 percent decline in the number of property crimes.

Year-to-year changes released Monday by the FBI in its preliminary figures on crimes reported to police in 2010 also showed declines in all four categories of violent crime in 2010. All categories for property crime went down as well.

"In a word, remarkable," said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University. In Fox's view, the declines signify success for aggressive law enforcement and corrections programs and comprehensive crime prevention efforts. He said the crime levels could easily rise if the current environment of state and local budget cutting extends to law enforcement measures that are working.

Some experts are puzzled.

Expectations that crime would rise in the economic recession have not materialized. The size of the most crime-prone population age groups, from late teens through mid-20s, has remained relatively flat in recent years.

"I have not heard of any good explanations for the good news we've been experiencing in 2009 and 2010," said professor Alfred Blumstein of Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz School of Public Policy. "I hope the trend continues and I'm going to keep searching for answers."

Violent crime last increased in 2005. Property crime last increased in 2002.

The FBI reported that violent crime fell in all four regions of the country last year — 7.5 percent in the South, 5.9 in the Midwest, 5.8 percent in the West and 0.4 percent in the Northeast.

The bureau's preliminary statistics for 2010 are based on data from more than 13,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide.

Nationally, murder and non-negligent manslaughter declined 4.4 percent, forcible rape decreased 4.2 percent, robbery declined 9.5 percent, and aggravated assault was down 3.6 percent.

Related posts are in the crime rates index.  Commentary on the latest survey, in the next post.

North Carolina: Murders Down, Death Sentences Down

"On the decline: murders and death sentences," is the title of an OpEd by Frank R. Baumgartner.  He's a professor of political science at UNC-Chapel Hill.  It's a must-read:

Recently in several parts of North Carolina potential voters received fliers produced by the N.C. Republican Executive Committee charging that Democratic votes for the Racial Justice Act could lead to the immediate parole of death row inmates, allowing them to move into "your neighborhood," thanks to "ultra-liberal" members of the legislature such as Rep. Hugh Holliman.

In fact, the only "remedy" a death row inmate would be eligible for if a state court did indeed find racial bias affected the outcome of his case would be to see his death sentence changed to life without the possibility of parole.

Even more surprising, perhaps, is that the committee singled out the House majority leader for his vote; Holliman's own daughter was murdered in 1985 and he supports the death penalty.

Crime is always an emotional subject and in an election period appearing "tough on crime" can seem politically expedient. But certainly we should be careful with the facts as well.

North Carolina has not executed anyone since 2006. Some of the "tough on crime" voices claim that when executions are halted murder rates will increase, but as it turns out, the facts point in the opposite direction.

The state Department of Justice reported in July that murder rate declined by 19.1 percent in 2009 compared to 2008. The number of murders in 2009 was 482, and the rate per 100,000 population 5.5. These are the lowest numbers on record during the modern period of capital punishment.

In fact, the murder rate has been declining steadily since reaching its peak of 11.42 per 100,000 population in 1991. Following national trends, homicides have declined steadily since that time, reaching 8.5 per 100,000 in 1997, 6.8 in 2002 and generally staying in that area until 2008 when they declined sharply to the current figure of 5.5 in 2009.

Let us hope that the latest number is a continuation of a trend, not just a one-year fluke. But there is no mistaking the longer-term trend: Homicides in North Carolina, as in the nation, increased sharply from the early 1980s to the mid-1990s, and have been on a steady downward trend since then.

And:

North Carolina reached its peak in death sentences with 34 inmates condemned in 1995. These numbers declined regularly until they were in the single digits by 2002, and numbered just 4, 3, 1 and 2 from 2006 to 2009. No executions have taken place since 2006.

Are North Carolinians in greater danger because fewer executions and death sentences are taking place? A simple look at the numbers suggests otherwise. From 1995, death sentences and murder rates have declined in virtual lock-step, much to the surprise of those who would suggest that executions are a strong deterrent to violent crime. Data from our state suggest that we have paid no price in terms of violence as we have suspended executions after so many recent controversies relating to innocent men spending years on death row and concerns about the constitutionality of our execution method.

Baumgartner is co-author of The Decline of the Death Penalty and the Discovery of Innocence.  More on the book, here.  You can order it from Amazon. Still more from Baumgartner, here.

FBI Reports Violent Crime Down in 2009

The Preliminary Annual Uniform Crime Report for 2009 is available from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Preliminary figures indicate that, as a whole, law enforcement agencies throughout the Nation reported a decrease of 5.5 percent in the number of violent crimes brought to their attention for 2009 when compared with figures reported for 2008. The violent crime category includes murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. The number of property crimes in the United States in 2009 decreased 4.9 percent when compared with data from 2008. Property crimes include burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft. Arson is also a property crime, but data for arson are not included in property crime totals. Figures for 2009 indicate that arson decreased 10.4 percent when compared to 2008 figures.

The AP posts, "FBI says violent crime rate down again," via Google News.

The violent crime rate in the United States went down in 2009 for the third year in a row and the property crime rate fell for the seventh consecutive year, the FBI reported Monday.

The decline last year amounted to 5.5 percent for violent crime compared to 2008 and the rate for property crime was down 4.9 percent.

The FBI collected the crime data from more than 13,000 law enforcement agencies around the country.

According to the numbers, all four categories of violent crime declined compared to 2008 — robbery, murder, aggravated assault and forcible rape.

Violent crime in the South fell by 6.6 percent, dropped 5.6 percent in the West, declined 4.6 percent in the Midwest and went down 3.5 percent in the Northeast.

Violent crime declined 4 percent in metropolitan counties and 3 percent elsewhere, the FBI reported.

Nationwide, the murder rate was down 7.2 percent last year.

The largest decrease in murders — 7.5 percent — took place in cities of half a million to a million in population. The only increase in murders — 5.3 percent — occurred in cities with 25,000 to 50,000 people.

Charlie Savage writes, "U.S. Crime Rates Fell Despite Economy," for the New York Times.

Compared with 2008, violent crimes declined by 5.5 percent last year, and property crimes decreased 4.9 percent, according to the F.B.I.’s preliminary annual crime report. There was an overall decline in reported crimes for the third straight year; the last increase was in 2006.

The bureau’s figures are compiled from data voluntarily submitted by 13,237 local and state law enforcement agencies across the country, and measure the number of offenses reported to the authorities. A bureau spokesman declined to speculate about any explanation for the trend.

Violent crimes — like murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault — fell in cities and rural areas alike, led by a 7.5 percent drop in cities with populations between 500,000 and a million and a 6.9 percent drop in cities with more than a million inhabitants.

The steepest decline was in robbery reports — 8.1 percent — followed by murder with a 7.2 percent decline overall. However, there were some exceptions: murders rose by 1.8 percent in rural areas, and by 5.3 percent in cities with populations between 25,000 and 50,000 inhabitants.

The Washington Post has, "Despite economy, FBI says U.S. violent crime rate is down again," by Jerry Markon.

For the third consecutive year, violent crime declined in the United States in 2009, including a 7.2 percent reduction in murder, preliminary FBI figures showed Monday.

And:

The national violent crime rate had risen in 2005 and 2006 after years of decline, sparking concerns that a focus on homeland security under the Bush administration after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks was draining resources away from traditional crime fighting.

But crimes of violence began going down again in 2007, falling 0.7 percent that year and then another 1.9 percent in 2008. The trend accelerated last year with a 5.5 percent reduction in overall violent crime, with decreases of 8.1 percent in robberies, 4.2 percent in aggravated assaults and 3.1 percent in rapes.

Related posts are in the crime rates index.

Opinion Roundup

"Death penalty too costly, doesn’t deter murderers," is the editorial in Connecticut's Norwich Bulletin.

There were 135 murders committed in Connecticut in 2006, the highest amount reported since 1998, which also had 135 murders.

But the 2006 figure is the more important one. That was the year after the state executed serial killer Michael Ross. His execution apparently did little to deter others from taking lives.

In fact, the state has recorded more murders in the four years after Ross’ execution than in the four years leading up to it. From 2001 through 2004, 411 murders were committed compared to 478 from 2006 through 2009.

Of the 10 inmates now on Connecticut’s death row, three were sentenced to death after Ross’ execution — Leslie Campbell III and Russell Peeler, both in 2007, and Lazale Ashby in 2008.
Connecticut’s death penalty is not a deterrent to murder. It hasn’t stopped the violence.

Not everyone convicted of murder is sentenced to death. The vast majority of those who are convicted end up serving long sentences, some life sentences with no chance of parole. And those who are sentenced to death spend decades on death row because of the law’s endless series of appeals available to them. The legal costs of those appeals is staggering; the pain and suffering they bring to victims’ families is immeasurable.

It’s time Connecticut joined other states in repealing the death penalty.

Last week marked the fifth anniversary of Ross’ execution, the first state-sponsored execution in Connecticut in 45 years. Ross admitted killing eight women, six in New London and Windham counties and two others in New York. He served 18 years on death row after his convictions, and was only executed due to his own efforts to have the sentence carried out.

And:

We agree with the current crop of gubernatorial candidates — Democrats and Republicans — that the repeal of the state’s death penalty is not a top priority in this year’s election or for the next administration and Legislature. Creating jobs and addressing the state’s fiscal policies are the priority and should be.

But it is an issue in this year’s campaign. It is expected the Legislature will again next year move to adopt legislation calling for its repeal.

And it is the one issue in this campaign that each of the gubernatorial candidates has been clear about in regards to where they stand.

The five Republicans — Lt. Gov. Michael Fedele, Tom Foley, Oz Griebel, Larry DeNardis and Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton — do not favor the repeal of the law and have said they would veto any attempt to so.

The two Democrats — Ned Lamont and Dan Malloy — agree they would sign the legislation to repeal the law if such a measure was sent to their desk

Saturday's Salt Lake Tribune carried the OpEd, "Capital punishment: The ugly truth," by Erin Mcguire.

On April 23, death row inmate Ronnie Gardner's decision to be executed by firing squad was accepted by state court Judge Robin Reese. As the first capital punishment execution in Utah since 1999, it has once more rekindled a decades-old debate: Should Utah remain a death penalty state?

Capital punishment continues to be used for a few reasons: It's believed to be a major crime deterrent and cheaper than life imprisonment in already overcrowded prisons, and the executions can be done humanely through lethal injection. However, based on recent findings, none of these reasons are valid.

In 2007, the U.S. Department of Justice made its annual report of crime rates across the country, including cities with the highest population. Cities in each of the 15 non-death-penalty states consistently had lower crime rates than cities within the 35 states that did have the death penalty. An example being New York City, without the death penalty, which had a total of 613 violent crimes compared to Philadelphia, which does have the death penalty and had a total of 1,475 violent crimes.

Similar reports done each year by the Federal Bureau of Investigation show that non-death-penalty states have had noticeably lower crime rates since 1991.

And:

Capital punishment, stripped of these three justifications, is only a means to immediate retribution. However, death-row inmates can be punished just as strictly through life without parole sentences that avoid aren't unconstitutional, expensive or ineffective. More than 90 countries across the globe have abolished the death penalty, including the entirety of Western Europe, and 15 states have followed their example. It may be time for Utah to do the same.

"Md. executions waste families' time and taxpayers' money," by Melanie Share appears in today's Washington Post Letters.  She is a board member of Maryland Citizens Against State Executions. 

Polling from 2007 shows that Marylanders are ready to get rid of the death penalty and replace it with a maximum punishment of life in prison without the possibility of parole. And yet former governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. is trying to make an issue out of the death penalty ["Ehrlich takes issue with death penalty delays," Metro, May 8].

A 30-year low in violent crime in Maryland, including a 12 percent drop in homicides, comes alongside a nearly four-year moratorium on executions, due to the Court of Appeals having tossed out the state's execution method. The reality is that our ineffective death penalty wastes money that could be better spent on effective public safety efforts.

There is earlier coverage from Connecticut, Maryland, and Utah at the links.

Crime & Capital Punishment Issues in the Maryland Governor's Race

Saturday's Washington Post reported, "Ehrlich takes issue with O'Malley's delays on death penalty."  It's written by John Wagner.

Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) has repeatedly fallen short in his attempts to persuade lawmakers to abolish capital punishment. But as he nears the end of his term, O'Malley is close to achieving through delay and inertia what he could not change in the law.

Three-and-a-half years after the state's highest court halted use of the death penalty on a technicality, O'Malley has yet to implement regulations required for executions to resume. Although O'Malley says his administration is working diligently in that direction, advocates on both sides of the issue say they strongly doubt that any of Maryland's five condemned prisoners will be put to death before the governor stands for reelection this fall.

With jobs and the economy dominating the political debate, there is little evidence that O'Malley's posture on the death penalty has hurt him politically to this point. But his leading opponent, former governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R), said that he plans to make it an issue, accusing O'Malley and other death penalty opponents of "shenanigans" to avoid carrying out the law.

"This is the kind of thing that makes people cynical about the criminal justice system," said Ehrlich, who presided over the state's last execution, in 2005. "Governor O'Malley took an oath to uphold the law. He's certainly violating the spirit of it."

The debate in Maryland, one of 35 states with a death penalty statute, comes as capital punishment continues to draw attention across the country. Executions nationwide increased somewhat last year, but the number of new death sentences handed down fell to the lowest total since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

O'Malley bristled at Ehrlich's characterization, attributing part of the delay to a legislative review committee that six months ago raised numerous questions about regulations drafted by the administration, including its choice of a three-drug cocktail for lethal injections. Administration officials said a formal response was mailed to the committee Friday morning.

"We are following the process for putting the new regulations in place," O'Malley said. "Everything about the death penalty is cumbersome and can be slow."

Contrast that report with, "Drop in crime might be a boost for O'Malley," by Aaron C. Davis, in today's Post. 

Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley is scheduled to announce Monday that the state recorded fewer violent crimes last year than at any point since 1979 and that the overall number of crimes dipped to an all-time low since Maryland police began uniformly reporting them more than 35 years ago.

By another key measure -- the likelihood that a resident will fall victim to murder, rape, robbery or violent assault -- Maryland is expected to drop out of the nation's 10 most dangerous states for the first time in more than two decades.

Maryland's improving public safety record stands out even amid a national phenomenon of falling crime rates, including a precipitous drop last year in the number of homicides across the greater Washington region.

The good news comes at an opportune time for O'Malley: at the outset of his reelection campaign. Over the coming months, O'Malley (D), who won the governor's mansion in part on a reputation as Baltimore's tough-on-crime mayor, is expected to reclaim the mantle of crime fighter.

But with crime rates falling fast nationwide, assessing how much credit O'Malley deserves for Maryland's record lows remains a tough task. Recent high-profile crimes, including the killing of an 11-year-old Eastern Shore girl in December that exposed major gaps in the state's supervision of sex predators and the slaying in February of a teacher at a state-run juvenile detention facility in Prince George's County, have provided entry points for O'Malley's challenger, former governor Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R), to question the state's progress.

During this year's General Assembly session, Ehrlich criticized O'Malley and the state's Democratic-controlled legislature for failing to more quickly tighten sex-offender rules. Last week, Ehrlich accused O'Malley and powerful Democrats opposed to capital punishment of "shenanigans" to circumvent the state's death penalty laws, effectively maintaining a de facto moratorium on executions for Maryland's five death-row inmates.

In an interview Saturday, O'Malley said he was looking forward to making the case that his administration's award-winning tactics aimed at cracking down on violent repeat offenders, tightening parole and probation standards, targeting at-risk youths and clearing the state's backlog of unanalyzed DNA samples have made Marylanders safer.

"They haven't always made headlines, but there's a lot of things that we have been doing over the last four years on a statewide basis that have helped local law enforcement prevent crime, solve crime and therefore save lives," O'Malley said. "It's time to report back to the public the things that we're doing well."

Earlier coverage from Maryland begins with this post.

The Murderous Society

Jill Lepore writes, "Why is American history so murderous?" for the November 9 edition of the New Yorker.

Every murder raises terrible questions that no trial, no law, no punishment can answer. What forces make it possible for one human being to take the life of another? Murders can be solved and even explained—at least, that’s the operating assumption of criminal investigation and the narrative logic behind every whodunit—but to think about a specific murder with any clarity, or for very long, can be difficult, and viscerally painful. Maybe the brisk trade in lurid violence as spectacle has something to do with it: one either watches or averts one’s eyes; dispassionate reflection rarely enters into it. Scholars ranging from theologians and psychologists to evolutionary biologists have offered theories about murder—theories of evil, theories of disease, theories of disposition—but the analytical burden placed on any general discussion of murder, freighted, as it is, with atrocity, is nearly unbearable. Nothing suffices, or can.

Between the convulsive emotional response to a single murder and an elusive general theory of murder lies another kind of contemplation: the study of the murderousness of nations. The United States has the highest homicide rate of any affluent democracy, nearly four times that of France and the United Kingdom, and six times that of Germany. Why? Historians haven’t often asked this question. Even historians who like to try to solve cold cases usually cede to sociologists and other social scientists the study of what makes murder rates rise and fall, or what might account for why one country is more murderous than another. Only in the nineteen-seventies did historians begin studying homicide in any systematic way. In the United States, that effort was led by Eric Monkkonen, who died in 2005, his promising work unfinished. Monkkonen’s research has been taken up by Randolph Roth, whose book “American Homicide” (Harvard; $45) offers a vast investigation of murder, in the aggregate, and over time. Roth’s argument is profoundly unsettling. There is and always has been, he claims, an American way of murder. It is the price of our politics.

And:

Pieter Spierenburg, a professor of historical criminology at Erasmus University, in Rotterdam, sifts through the evidence in “A History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Present” (Polity; $24.95). In Europe, homicide rates, conventionally represented as the number of murder victims per hundred thousand people in the population per year, have been falling for centuries. Spierenburg attributes this long decline to what the German sociologist Norbert Elias called the “civilizing process” (shorthand for a whole class of behaviors requiring physical restraint and self-control, right down to using a fork instead of eating with your hands or stabbing at your food with a knife), and to the growing power of the centralizing state to disarm civilians, control violence, enforce law and order, and, broadly, to hold a monopoly on the use of force. (Anthropologists sometimes talk about a related process, the replacement of a culture of honor with a culture of dignity.) In feuding medieval Europe, the murder rate hovered around thirty-five. Duels replaced feuds. Duels are more mannered; they also have a lower body count. By 1500, the murder rate in Western Europe had fallen to about twenty. Courts had replaced duels. By 1700, the murder rate had dropped to five. Today, that rate is generally well below two, where it has held steady, with minor fluctuations, for the past century.

The Real Murder Mystery? It's the Low Crime Rate

That's the title of a New York Times report by Shaila Dewan.  It appeared in the Saturday edition.  LINK  Here's an extended excerpt:

MAYBE it is time to call in one of those clairvoyants who help detectives solve the case. Because no one else can explain what criminals have been doing in the first half of 2009.

Not that the news is bad — from New York to Los Angeles to Madison, Wis., major crimes, violent or not, are down between 7 percent and 22 percent over the same period last year. In Chicago, the number of homicides dropped 12 percent. In Charlotte, N.C., hard hit by the banking crisis, that total fell an astounding 38 percent. It is too soon to conclude that crime will decline throughout the recession, and the new numbers, which come from standardized reports that police departments send to the F.B.I., have yet to be made into a national measure. But crime was supposed to go up, not sharply down.

The surprise is yet more proof that tea leaves and sun spots may be a better predictor of crime rates than criminologists and the police. Despite the large sums the country spends on law enforcement — just last week, the Justice Department awarded the first of $1 billion in stimulus-package grants to police departments — experts are largely at a loss to explain what makes the crime rate go up or down. Even the exceptions to the latest trend are baffling. Why, for example, did crime go up in Denver, of all places? Denver isn’t sure.

Many experienced criminologists admit to being confounded, but point out that economists have no better track record. “If I could predict the crime rate,” said Barry Krisberg, the president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, “I’d start working as a stock broker.”

No single lens — sociological, econometrical, liberal or conservative — seems an adequate one through which to view crime. The economy, which seems as if it should be fundamental, has never been a good predictor; the Prohibition era was far more violent than the Great Depression. Adding prison beds has not helped; the incarceration rate has marched grimly upward for decades, while the crime rate has zigzagged up and down, seemingly oblivious. Years ago, criminologists thought demographics explained a lot — remember the warnings about thousands of cold-blooded, teenage “superpredators” in the mid-1990s? — but demographics cannot shed light on what is happening now. Improved policing deserves credit for bigger declines in certain cities, but not the overall national trend.

Scholars have attributed lower crime rates to everything from an influx of immigrants, who tend to keep a low profile; to changes in public housing policy that have dispersed the poor; to better medicine (more lives saved in the operating room equals fewer homicides); to a marked shift in the attitudes of the young and poor (the hip-hop generation, which was supposed to be desensitized by explicit lyrics and large swaths of visible underwear, has turned out fine).

The search for a silver bullet — a single factor that could explain the steady drop in crime since the mid-1990s — has taken theorists far afield. There is the abortion theory, which proposes that legalized abortion reduced the number of unwanted children who turned to a life of crime. It’s a seductive explanation for United States data, but it does not bear out in other countries that legalized abortion in the 1970s, said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California at Berkeley. There is the gun theory, which posits that expanded gun ownership rights have deterred criminals who now must consider whether their victims are armed. But that does not explain the most significant decline in the country, in New York City, where gun ownership is low, said Mr. Zimring, who dedicated part of his book, “The Great American Crime Decline,” to debunking such theories. (Despite writing that exhaustive volume, Professor Zimring admits that for criminologists, “the score is Know: 2; Don’t Know: 8.”)

"Data show Houston crime rate outpaces officers, by Bradley Olson appeared in Monday's Houston Chronicle.

Houston has a higher rate of violent crime than any other Texas city and ranks among the highest in the nation, according to a Houston Chronicle analysis of FBI crime data in the 25 most populous U.S. cities.

The city also has fewer police officers per capita or per square mile than the national average, the analysis shows.

In the nearly six years of Mayor Bill White's administration, the number of police officers has remained roughly the same, despite the Houston Police Department budget increasing more than 40 percent since 2004, from about $480 million to $680 million for fiscal 2010. That increase is due almost entirely to the ballooning costs of salaries, pension and health care benefits built into police contracts with the city.

The federal government last week declined to provide stimulus funding for additional police academy classes based on the city's fiscal health and recent declines in Houston's crime rate compared to previous years. Overall crime in the city is as low as it has been in decades, but looming budgetary problems have led to cuts in overtime and plans for only two police academy classes this year, compared to an average of five a year since White took office.

And:

Of the top 25 most populous cities in the United States, Houston ranked eighth highest in violent crime in 2008, the Chronicle analysis shows, with 1,105 violent crimes per 100,000 Houstonians. Dallas had 892 violent crimes per 100,000.

Violent crime, a metric kept by the FBI and police departments across the country as a barometer of an area's safety, includes murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault.

Considering murder alone, Houston falls to ninth on the list, with 13 murders per 100,000 residents, the same as Dallas. When property crimes, such as burglary and larceny, are included, Houston falls among the 25 largest cities to 13th, putting its total crime rate in the median range of big U.S. cities.

Police Chief Harold Hurtt said the best measure of where Houston stands in terms of criminality is in comparing its crime rate to previous years, since different places present different crime-fighting scenarios, such as the geographic area of a city or its number of high-crime apartment complexes. The FBI warns against comparisons for those same reasons.

But Houstonians, according to polling data, are as concerned about crime as ever. Nearly three quarters of residents interviewed in 2008 for Rice University's annual Houston Area Survey said they were “somewhat worried” or “very worried” they or a family member will become a crime victim. That is higher than any year since the mid-'90s, a time only a few years removed from when Houston had more than 500 murders annually and some of the highest crime rates in the country.

Hurtt said murder is down 8 percent this year compared to last, and he said the number of sexual and aggravated assaults is difficult to impact because about two thirds of those crimes are relationship-based.

Related posts are in the crime rates index.

Continued Coverage of Radelet & Lacock Study

Opposing Views carries, "States Without Death Penalty Have Lower Murder Rates," by Amnesty International.

Scientists agree, by an overwhelming majority, that the death penalty has no deterrent effect. They felt the same way over ten years ago, and nothing has changed since then. States without the death penalty continue to have significantly lower murder rates than those that retain capital punishment. And the few recent studies purporting to prove a deterrent effect, though getting heavy play in the media, have failed to impress the larger scientific community, which has exposed them as flawed and inconsistent.

The latest issue of the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology contains a study by a Sociology professor and a graduate student at the University of Colorado-Boulder (Michael Radelet and Traci Lacock), examining the opinions of leading criminology experts on the deterrence effects of the death penalty.

The results reveal that most experts do not believe that the death penalty or the carrying out of executions serve as deterrents to murder, nor do they believe that existing empirical research supports the deterrence theory. In fact, the authors report that 88.2% of respondents do not think that the death penalty deters murder—a level of consensus comparable to the agreement among scientists regarding global climate change. At the same time, only 9.2% of surveyed experts indicated that they believed the death penalty results in a significant drop in murder cases (56.6% completely disagreed with that statement, while 32.9% thought the correlation between capital punishment and lower homicide numbers to be “largely inaccurate”; 1.3% were uncertain).

The study builds upon previous research, published in 1996, in which the opinions of 67 leading experts in the field of criminology were surveyed. The most recent study sent the same questions to a new group of experts (a total of 73), among whom were fellows from the American Society of Criminology, as well as award-winning criminology scholars.

Earlier coverage begins with this post.

Controlling Corrections Costs in Illinois: Lessons from the Coasts

That's the title of a new report by Malcolm Young of the Northwestern University School of Law. examining the impact of criminal justice systems in New York and California.

"Study finds N.Y.'s crime-fighting strategies more effective than California's," is Lynne Marek's report in the National Law Journal

The more lenient incarceration and sentencing practices of New York have resulted in a bigger drop in crime and smaller prison population than have the stiffer practices of California, a Northwestern University School of Law report argues.

New York's prison population declined by 9% between 1995 and 2007, while it's violent and property crime rates fell by 47% and 51%, respectively, during the same period, according to data in the report. California's prison population rose by 31% during that period, while the two types of crime declined by 46% and 38%, respectively, the report said. Northwestern adjunct professor Malcolm C. Young, the author of the report, attributes the dichotomy to the differences in the states' mandatory minimum sentences, incarceration policies and rehabilitation efforts.

"The data show that you can increase prisons and have less effect on crime than can be achieved in a state that chooses not to increase its incarceration," Malcolm said in an interview. "Treatment and rehabilitation are important, but what New York learned is that a lot of these people just don't need to be in the criminal justice system."

California's mandatory sentences for three convictions, the "three strikes law," have resulted in costly overcrowding of the state's prisons with a worse result in terms of reduced crime than experienced by New York, which has fewer mandatory minimum sentences, Young said. New York's crime rate also dropped more than California's even as it had relatively minimal criminal justice supervision of low-level offenders, he said.

In the study, titled "Controlling Corrections Costs in Illinois: Lessons from the Coasts," Young argues that Illinois should follow the example of New York to most successfully fight crime, reduce spending on prisons and rehabilitate offenders. Young founded and previously directed the Sentencing Project, a national organization based in Washington that seeks to promote fair sentencing laws and alternatives to incarceration.

Northwestern has issued a news release, "Report: New York Offers Model for Cutting Crime and Costs in Illinois."

Illinois is positioned to follow New York’s lead in reducing crime and incarceration rates while opening the door to much needed savings in the state budget, according to a new Northwestern University School of Law report.

The report contrasts the crime-fighting strategies of New York and California, two large states that moved in different directions, to offer Illinois lessons about what will and won’t work in combating crime during an unprecedented downturn in the economy.

New York’s effective crime-fighting reforms are cited in contrast to the pitfalls of California’s “three-strikes-you’re-out” politics, inflexible sentencing schemes and uncontrolled corrections costs. 

With 24 recommendations, the report argues for a dramatic shift in Illinois’ tough-on-crime politics to enable the state to greatly expand upon crime- and cost-reducing strategies that really work.

“Our bond courts and pre-trial decisions need to work much better so that we quit locking up people who don’t belong in the courts or prison in the first place,” said Malcolm C. Young, adjunct professor in Northwestern Law’s Bluhm Legal Clinic.

“We need laws that recognize that many low-level drug offenders don’t have to be incarcerated as well as greatly expanded opportunities for drug-treatment services and rehabilitation.”

And:

California increased its prison population by 31 percent from 1995 to 2007, during which time its violent and property crime rates fell by 46 and 38 percent, respectively, according to the report. Over the same time period, New York decreased its prison population by 9 percent, while its violent and property crime rates decreased by 51 and 47 percent, respectively.

“California faces a financial meltdown with a deficit in excess of $41 billion and has lost control over correction costs that have exploded fivefold since 1994 to $13 billion,” Young said.

“By contrast, the reduction of New York’s prison population could lead to the closing of four half-empty adult prisons, and more savings are likely with reduced sentences in drug cases and increased judicial discretion,” he said.

In recent years (from 1995 to 2007), Illinois’ use of incarceration and its trends in crime are closer to California’s than to New York’s, according to the report. Illinois’ increase of its prison population (20 percent) was slower than California’s (31 percent), but the upward trend is opposite to New York’s 9 percent decrease in state prisoners. Over the same time period, Illinois’ decreases in crime rates were similar to California’s but less than New York’s.

Illinois, however, the report stressed, has the tools, resources and agencies similar to those in New York to control incarceration and costs. “What Illinois needs most is the political will to move beyond the tough-on-crime rhetoric, to build on its good efforts and replicate strategies that have worked in New York and elsewhere,” Young said. 
 
New York never enacted rigid determinate sentencing and, apart from the notorious Rockefeller drug laws, avoided high mandatory minimums, according to the report. New York also invested in an infrastructure of alternatives to incarceration. It rapidly disposes of thousands of minor cases without lengthy pre-trial or post-sentencing incarceration and recently revised stiff drug-sentencing laws to keep low-level drug offenders out of prison and accommodate the release of rehabilitated offenders before the end of their sentences.

Violent and Property Crimes Declined in 2007

That's the title of an AP dispatch from Washington.  LINK

Both violent and property crimes declined in 2007 from the previous year, the FBI reported Monday. But one expert warned the figures could mask a growing murder problem among young black men.

In preliminary figures for crimes reported to police, the bureau said the number of violent crimes declined by 1.4 percent from 2006, reversing two years of rising violent crime numbers. Violent crime had climbed 1.9 percent in 2006 and 2.3 percent in 2005, alarming federal and local officials.

Property crimes were down 2.1 percent last year from the previous year, the largest drop in the last four years.

Because the FBI preliminary figures do not contain the detailed breakdowns by age, race and gender of the final report that comes later in the year, one expert, James Alan Fox, said they may unintentionally mask a growing murder rate among black male teenagers and young adults, particularly with guns.

And:

The largest declines were in vehicle theft, down 8.9 percent and in rape, down 4.3 percent and murder, down 2.7 percent.

The crime trends were not uniform. Murders, for instance, were down in cities of more than 250,000, including an enormous 9.8 percent drop in cities of more than a million residents. But murders rose in some small cities - up 3.7 percent in cities of 50,000 to 100,000, up 1.9 percent in cities of 100,000 to 250,000, and up 1.8 percent in cities under 10,000. Historically, murder trends have begun in the largest cities and moved over several years to smaller ones.

The complete FBI report is here.

14 Years Later: Tell My Story

That's the title of the primary story in today's final installment of the Denver Post series, "Trashing the Truth."  It tells the story of Floyd Brown, a North Carolina man with mental retardation trapped the criminal justice system.  LINK

Without the stick or other samples to test for the murderer's genetic fingerprint, Brown is unable to defend himself, bearing the burden of a system that allows authorities to lose and even trash biological evidence.

He is one of 141 inmates The Denver Post has found nationwide whose cases have been derailed because their evidence was lost, mishandled or destroyed.

Brown's may be the most alarming. He has been denied a trial because of his disability. And the only evidence against him is a confession that doesn't read like the words of a man who can't tell time.

"Tell people my name, F-l-o-d B-o-n-w. That's my name," Brown says. "They done lost my evidence. That's my story. Tell the people to remember it."

Today's final installment also has these articles:

Experts call for change

Prisoners denied DNA testing after evidence goes missing

Rediscovered evidence proves innocence after 24 years

Apple tossed in garbage may have cleared man

Key evidence goes missing in Georgia church murders

Questionable rape conviction stands for 23 years and counting

The series front is here.

Violent Crime in Harris County

Looking at the Houston and Texas section of the Houston Chronicle is tantamount to reading a police blotter; lots of daily violence.  Today the Chronicle has, "Violent crimes decline in 2007, HPD statistics show."

Crime rates for all violent offenses — murders, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults — in Houston decreased 5.4 percent during the first five months of 2007.

From Jan. 1 through May 31, violent crimes totaled 9,561 — down from 10,103 during the same period in 2006.

The rate (per 100,000 population) for murder is down 10.8 percent from 2006; rape 28.6 percent; robberies 7.2 percent; and aggravated assault 4.6 percent.

"It impossible to pinpoint one specific factor that has led to the declines. Obviously, we have initiatives in place that we feel are effective, but it's too soon to say what the exact, specific impact is," said Houston police spokesman John Cannon.

There were a total of 162 murders in the first five months of 2006. That has dropped to 148 in the comparable part of 2007. Reported rapes dropped from 369 in 2006 to 268 through May 2007.

Houston Violent Crime Rate Outpaces Nation

The subtitle is "For the first half of '06, Houston's killings increased 2.8%, the nation's 1.4%, report shows."

Nationwide, robberies were up by almost 10 percent, killings increased 1.4 percent and aggravated assaults increased 1.2 percent, while rapes decreased less than 0.1 percent. Overall, violent crime increased in all four regions of the country from January to June this year, compared with the same period last year.

Violent crimes, including killings and rapes, rose by 5.9 percent in Houston, the report indicates, compared with 3.7 percent nationwide. Killings in Houston during that period rose by a staggering 28 percent — from 158 last year to 202 this year. Rapes, aggravated assaults and property crimes all remained at about the same level.

Elsewhere in Texas, violent crimes in Dallas, El Paso and Lubbock remained about the same.

The Washington Post provides a national perspective with, "Violent Crime Is Up For 2nd Straight Year."

A surge in violent crime that began last year accelerated in the first half of 2006, the FBI reported yesterday, providing the clearest signal yet that the historic drop in the U.S. crime rate has ended and is being reversed.

Reports of homicides, assaults and other violent offenses surged by nearly 4 percent in the first six months of the year compared with the same time period in 2005, according to the FBI's latest Uniform Crime Report. The numbers included an increase of nearly 10 percent for robberies, which many criminologists consider a leading indicator of coming trends.

The results follow a 2.5 percent jump in violent crime for 2005, which at the time represented the largest increase in 15 years.

The latest numbers suggest that those results were not an anomaly but rather part of the first significant uptick in violent crime since the early 1990s, according to criminal justice experts.

Houston to Be Part of National Crime Study

The Associated Press is reporting that Houston will be one of 18 areas examined nationally to determine why murder rates and other violent crimes are on the increase.  The Houston Chronicle's website has this.

The Justice Department study comes after FBI data in September showed violent criminal activity — including rape, murder, robbery and aggravated assault — rising by 2.2 percent from last year. That marked the first increase in violent crimes since 2001.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced the study at a Boston meeting last month with police chiefs and other law enforcement officials. It will be rolled out in three phases: looking at crime increases in cities, analyzing those results for any trends, and identifying federal programs that can help.

It was not clear whether more federal funding will be available for cities, but Justice Department officials said that "new initiatives" could be created, if necessary.

The cities and regions are: Atlanta; Boston; metropolitan Charlotte, N.C.; Colorado Springs, Colo.; Columbus, Ohio; Hartford, Conn.; Houston; Jersey City, N.J.; metropolitan Kansas City, Mo.; Miami; Minneapolis-St. Paul; Nashville, Tenn.; Oklahoma City; Omaha, Neb.; Portland, Ore.; San Bernardino County, Calif.; San Diego; and the cities constituting the Tidewater, Va., area.

The report is also available on the AP website, here.

Violent Crime Rates Show Largest Increase Since 1993

That's the news from the FBI via the Center for American Progress.

The FBI released the Preliminary Annual Uniform Crime Report for 2005 today which showed the number of violent crime offenses rose 2.5 percent. According to the data, "Murders, robberies and aggravated assaults in the United States increased last year," spurring the first overall rise in violent crime since 2001, and the biggest increase since 1993. Murders rose 4.8 percent, robberies were up 4.5 percent, and aggravated assaults jumped 1.9 percent. There were 16,900 murder victims in 2005, the most since 1998, and the largest increase in 15 years. "We see that budgets for policing are being slashed and the federal government has gotten out of that business," said James Alan Fox, a criminal justice professor at Northeastern University in Boston. "Funding for prevention at the federal level and many localities are down and the (National Rifle Association) has renewed strength."