Originally posted by: DonVito
Again, CMSR, your "arguments" are, in my view, irrelevant non sequiturs. What exactly is it you're arguing for? All you seem to be doing is spinning your wheels.
Nothing as yet. Once your criterion becomes clear then I can make some arguments against it.
Allow me to suggest a clearer hypothetical than the bizarre, nonsensical one you have posted (albeit still a bizarre one):
African-Americans commit a disproportionately high percentage of crimes, as a matter of statistical fact (leaving aside the issue of why this is the case, it clearly is). Presumably if our only goal were to deter crime, at all costs, one effective way of doing so would be to sterilize black women, and/or march all black people into ovens. Obviously, IMO, this would be a monstrous way of reducing crime, as well as being unconstitutional. I fail to see how the financial impact of doing this has any relevance.
But here you could have the quantitive basis for not doing this that many people (blacks) would be killed, or would not be allowed to begin life, more than those that would be saved by such a scheme. So you would have a quantitive basis for not doing this. Financial concerns may come in because your criterion involves them: you said that if you have no quantitive basis for a policy
and your "tax dollars are at stake", then a policy is bad.
I don't believe you've disproven anything about the data I've posted, nor have you rebutted it in any way. Unless you have some alternate means for demonstrating that the death penalty is an effective deterrent, I'd suggest I win that round, since you have not refuted anything I've said in that regard. Argument, as litigators often point out, is not evidence.
You are arguing that the death penalty (the punishment of death for murder) has no detterent effect.
Your support for this was data which looked at murder rates in death penalty states and non-death penalty states.
I said that in death penalty states there whas been very minimal application of the death penalty - less than one per hundred murders.
Therefore the connection between the death penalty (that is to say punishing murders by death) and murders will be very difficult to identify statistically (certainly you can't do it using your simple method!) and will surely be outweighed by other factors (e.g. social differences) and statistical errors.
Look at this linear model for instance: murders=A*p+B*poverty+C*police expenditure+...+error
(Not an uncommon statistical model).
p is the probability of execution for each murderer. We want to identify A, the effect of executions on murders.
But since p is very small in US states the other factors will outweigh the Ap term (so your statistical method of comparing states is not appropriate) and the error term (unmodelled differences between states) may well also, making A unidentifiable.
As I also mentioned, the death penalty is much costlier (a Duke study done in the mid-90s found it was three to six times as expensive) than life imprisonment. I think I'm justified in asking the question of whether we're getting value for our money if we must have the death penalty, and the statistics suggest just the opposite.
Of course. The current scheme in the US, which costs a lot of money and carries out very few executions, with correspondingly little detterent effect. Your argument here is reasonable. I in fact agreed earlier, considering the US system disfunctional.
However actually making murder punishable by death with a significant probability I would think would have a considerable deterrent effect. Your data say nothing about this.
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