Capital Punishment: Sunstein And Vermeule

One of today’s most debated political and moral topics is that of Capital Punishment. Many people believe that the sanctity of life should take precedent over all, and that even if there is some deterrent effect stemming from capital punishment it is still not morally permissible. However, there are still others that believe that it is this same sanctity of life that requires the use of the death penalty in “death eligible” murder cases and capital punishment requires a certain “life-life tradeoff”. Two of the major supporters of the “life-life tradeoff” theory in regards to capital punishment are Cass R. Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule; together the two co-authored the very persuasive and well-written essay entitled: Is Capital Punishment Morally
The qualifier then comes with whether or not the loss of life is going to be in 1) the death of the death-row inmate or 2) the death of multiple innocents because of the lack of deterrence. The evidence used by Sunstein and Vermeule comes from recent econometric studies. In these studies the authors used either county-level panel data or state-level panel data to calculate the extent to which capital punishment and death sentences were a deterrent to other potential capital offenses. The results of these studies varied slightly in the projected amount of innocent lives saved, but all still found that capital punishment had some deterrent effects; the range of numbers are as follows: 18, 14, 5, and 4.5. For argument’s sake Sunstein and Vermeule used eighteen as the number of murders actually deterred by the use of capital punishment (that meaning that for every death sentence 18 theoretical or “statistical lives” are saved). Other evidence that supports their claim that the death penalty is a legitimate deterrent comes from the fact that during the moratorium of the death penalty from 1972-1976, 91% of the states noticed an increase in the homicide rate. Then, once the moratorium was lifted, 67% of states saw a significant decrease in the homicide rate. This
The reason I classified this as a moot point is because in many states, capital punishment is already firmly in place and it has been shown that there is no escalation of harm being done to capital offenders; it is actually quite the opposite. Throughout the years the system of capital punishment has become more and more refined and has actually digressed in terms of amount of harm done. The government has already greatly restricted the number of cases that can even be “death eligible” in that now no murderer who is either a juvenile or deemed mentally retarded can be executed. In addition to this, many forms of execution that at one point or another were deemed acceptable have been found to be cruel and/or unusual and because of such are no longer used as a viable way to execute a capital offender. Keeping this in mind how can anyone suggest that the government will ever partake in “execution plus” (the execution of not only the offender but also one of their close family members) regardless of its superior deterrent