I’ve asked this before
To preface this, I’m against the death penalty. Not for any touchy-feely, hippie tree hugging reason like most folks. I oppose it because it’s disproportionately applied to poor minorities. And, as AC Kleinheider says:
A society that uses capital punishment must be comfortable with one fact: You are going to kill innocent people. I don’t care how many appeals you exhaust or how much science you bring to it. Human error or human malice will result in the death of an innocent or two.
All that said, here’s a question I’ve proposed at other blogs but I’ll ask again:
Why do they schedule executions of the condemned at such God-awful hours?
During all the hooey about the 1,000th execution, number 999 or maybe 1,000 was executed at 2 in the morning. Tookie was executed after midnight.
Seems to me the real punishment when the death penalty is used is waiting around and knowing it’s going to happen. That’s compounded by the fact it’s going to happen at some odd hour.
December 13th, 2005 at 10:33 am
Seems to me the worst thing one can do when trying to achieve some political goal like clemency for a murderer is trot out celebrities.
December 13th, 2005 at 11:18 am
I heard the president called Tookie’s prison last night with some good news:
He said he had just saved a bunch of money on car insurance….
:rim shot:
December 13th, 2005 at 12:39 pm
“I oppose it because it’s disproportionately applied to poor minorities.”
Now, might that be — and I’m just brainstormin’ here — but might that be, at least in part, because poor minorities tend to commit homicide disproportionately?
Thanks for the linkage, BTW.
December 13th, 2005 at 12:42 pm
Sure. But it’s got more to do with being poor than anything else, I think.
December 13th, 2005 at 1:02 pm
I think they tend to happen after midnight because that’s the deadline for the phone call from the governor, then it takes a while to slather the guy up, pin him down, feed him an ice cream sundae, etc.
December 13th, 2005 at 1:50 pm
I have yet to hear a coherent argument against the death penalty which, if applied to everything else, wouldn’t prove a hell of a lot more than its proponents intended. Is the death penalty disproportionally applied to poor minorities? Probably not, as to the “minority” part, but probably so as to “poor” since rich people can afford better defense lawyers. But if disproportionality is an argument against the death penalty, it’s an argument against prisons, too, and against fines, and against community service, and against every other potential punishment for which a good lawyer has a better chance of getting you off than a bad lawyer does. Show a significant number of people who shouldn’t get the death penalty but do, and I’ll seriously entertain the possibility of abolishing the DP or at least suspending it until those issues can be addressed. But if all you can show me is that rich and/or white criminals aren’t being punished severely enough, the solution is to do something about that, not to intentionally create an equal injustice for all.
Kleinheider is correct, of course, that having a death penalty inevitably means some innocents will be executed eventually. However, that’s not much of an argument against the death penalty, either, as capital punishment is far from the only government policy that predictably results in some people dying who the state could otherwise have saved. The recent Emory study indicates that for each execution, 18 murders are prevented. If that number is anywhere close to the truth (and I have no reason to doubt that it is), then even an implausibly high number of wrongful executions is a small price to pay for all the lives saved in the process.
December 13th, 2005 at 1:52 pm
But, xrlq, the fines, imprisonment, etc. aren’t, you know, irreversible.
December 13th, 2005 at 2:03 pm
So? Very few of them are ever, you know, reversed. Besides, that one hypothetical, allegedly existent wrongful execution is no more or less, you know, reversible than the 18 murders that would have been committed otherwise.
December 13th, 2005 at 2:04 pm
Xrlq:
Actually, if I’m not mistaken, blacks (for example) are statistically more likely to be executed for similar crimes than their white counterparts, and men are much more likely to be executed than women.
And of course, the key difference between wrongful imprisonment and wrongful execution that you intentionally gloss over is that in the former case, there can at least be some attempt to compensate the wrongfully-accused for the wrongdoing. In the latter case, you can only say “Whoops!” and move on.
Of course, if you could actually provide any substantial evidence that executing murderers is a markedly better than imprisoning them for life without parole in the prevents-murders department, you might have a better argument there, too. But instead, all you’ve really got is a 2001 Emory University study that seems to be largely contradicted in part by a 2004 Emory study, which basically concludes that the only time capital punishment has any deterrent effect is when it’s widely applied. In 21 of 27 death penalty states, the murder rate was driven downward in only six. Personally, I suspect that what we actually have here is a case of correlation != causation, but you probably already knew that.
December 13th, 2005 at 2:18 pm
But enough are to make it worth it in my opinion. You hear the case periodically of some dude who spent 20 years in prision but was released due to new DNA evidence or some such.
December 13th, 2005 at 2:28 pm
Actually, no, I didn’t. Do you have an alternative explanation for the correlation? After all, while correlation does not equal causation, it does involve an element of causation, i.e., A causes B, B causes A, or a third factor C causes both A and B. If you’ve identified C, let’s hear it.
December 13th, 2005 at 3:55 pm
Xrlq:
Setting aside the fact that you’re betting your entire farm on one whole study (later contradicted, at least in part) with respect to the 18-to-1 ratio you keep parrotting, you’ve forgotten (or, I suspect, intentionally left out) the possibility that the correlation is coincidental, i.e. it does not involve an element of causation. Unless, of course, you really do believe that the decline in the number of pirates is partly responsible for global warming. I guess that based on other beliefs you’ve previously hung your hat on, that wouldn’t surprise me terribly much.
December 13th, 2005 at 8:46 pm
Close. That “possibility” does not exist, but apparently I did err in overlooking yet another possibility, which is that the word correlation does not mean what you think it means. That possibility did actually occur to me on the first go, but rather than insulting your diction, I thought it better to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that when you said “correlation” you actually meant correlation, and not a random co-occurrence. My bad.
I think you’d be pretty hard pressed to find a single post or comment in which I have said anything that can be remotely construed to suggest that piracy and global warming “correlate” in any way. Even if I had made such a claim, it would not follow that I thought a decline in the number of pirates had caused global warming. A correlation could also be based on a causal relationship in the opposite direction, i.e., some theory that had global warming cause fewer people to become pirates. Or they could correlate because some third factor resulted in both, e.g., the Navy sent more boats to patrol the high seas more thoroughly, resulting in more air pollution but fewer pirates.
Of course, I don’t believe any of those theories, which is why you’ll never catch me claiming that there is a correlation between piracy and global warming. Coicidence is not correlation.
Translated: if you butchered other statements of mine in the past as badly as you butchered this one just now, you probably came up with other conclusions that were just as inane as this one.
December 14th, 2005 at 3:37 pm
Just saw this at Slate: Why Executions Happen at Midnight
December 14th, 2005 at 3:48 pm
Ok, then.
December 14th, 2005 at 4:03 pm
That’s the Xrlq I know and love. Without solid ground to stand on, resort to either (A) semantic nitpicking, (B) character attacks, or better yet, both. If it makes you get your rocks off to have me admit that I should have said “apparent correlation” or, better, “ostensible correlation,” then consider this your free Happy Ending for the day.
Even being generous and granting, for the moment, that there is no “random co-occurrence” acting here, and that the one whole study you cited is, in fact, gospel truth, you still have done nothing to establish why, on your say-so and the say-so of one study, the burden of proof should be on those opposed to granting the state the power to execute people to prove beyond doubt that there is no C that causes both A and B.
As to your overwrought righteous indignation concerning pirates and global warming, you clearly missed or ignored the Flying Spaghetti Monster reference. I sometimes forget that you’re the only one who’s allowed to use absurd counterexamples to ridicule someone else’s “point.”
At the end of the day, we’re left with you hanging your proverbial hat on a single study, ignoring the fact that a single study proves nothing until it has been independently replicated, repeatedly ignoring the fact that the study has been contradicted at least in part by the same research organization, and marginalizing the objections of others to capital punishment based on these highly suspect premises. In other words, typical Xrlq reasoning.
December 14th, 2005 at 5:21 pm
As usual, Tom, you’re full of crap. If you meant random co-occurrence, you should have said that. If you thought the study I cited and the one you cited were full of crap when they described correlations, and not mere random co-occurrences, then you should have said that. But you failed on both counts, and somehow that’s supposed to be my fault?
Equally lame is your accusation that I “ignored” the 2004 study when citing the 2001 one. I suppose that if your understanding of the word “ignore” is as piss-poor as your understanding of the word “correlation,” then in Tomspeak, you may be right. In English, however, you are wrong; I could not have “ignored” a study I was not aware existed at all. In any event, the 2004 study does little to undermine my position; at most, it means we need to use the death penalty more often, not less.
We’re not arguing over someone’s guilt in a criminal trial, so it’s not up to either side to establish anything “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The burden of proof is on whoever is trying to change the status quo. If you’re happy with our death penalty laws in the present form, you have nothing to prove. If you favor abolition, you do. Me, I favor a broader application of the death penalty myself, which is corroborated not only by the study I cited, but also by the one you cited – oops, I mean the one I “ignored” – as well.
December 14th, 2005 at 7:38 pm
Gasp! More semantics and personal attacks? Who on earth might have expected that? I’m shocked, shocked I tell you. In any case, my accusations that you ignored the 2004 study didn’t start until after I pointed that study out to you. So I didn’t accuse you of ignoring something you weren’t aware of. I accused you of ignoring something I made you aware of. Instead, you chose to hide behind semantics and personal attacks, consistent with your tired MO.
And despite your spin, the 2004 study shows that capital punishment only seemed to act as a deterrent in six of twenty-seven states where executions occurred (~22%). This is contrary to your earlier broad-based assertion that there is an 18-to-1 ratio of murders prevented to executions. From the study:
Now you will of course argue that this means we should execute more people and therefore deter murder. But we don’t come even close to knowing that this will be the case. The 2001 study uses only the broadest of averages in coming to its conclusion, and is suspect at best. Even the 2004 study is far from perfect — it fails to compare against the fourteen non-death-penalty states or the nine death penalty states which executed no one (NY springs to mind) as controls, and it fails to correct for population, using only raw numbers. The study treats nine executions (its suggested threshold) no differently in Alabama than in California, and it similarly treats 100 murders in Alabama as no different statistically than 100 murders in Alabama.
Further, WRT the 2001 Emory study (released in 2002), one can’t help but notice that you’re cherry picking a result of the study that you like — 18 murders prevented per execution — and ignoring (or are ignorant of) another finding that you’re not likely to like:
So, essentially, the same study that finds executions deter murder also finds that NRA membership encourages murder. Nifty! Something tells me you’re less likely to hang your hat on that conclusion. Other cool facts about the 2001 study:
– It finds that tougher sentencing laws don’t have any deterrent effect, either.
– It conveniently only looks at 1990’s data in arriving at its figure. (You remember the 1990’s — a period of unprecedented growth and prosperity? Not that this could be mistaken for a “third factor C” or anything.)
– It finds that “An increase in any of the three probabilities of arrest, sentencing, or execution tends to reduce the crime rate.” [Emphasis added]
– The margin of error on the 18-to-1 ratio is plus-or-minus ten — not exactly the level of precision one might expect.
– In coming to the 18-to-1 ratio, it makes the same mistake as the 2004 study, in failing to correct for population, instead comparing the number of murders to the number of executions, rather than their corresponding rates.
What you’re left with, in essence, is lies, damn lies, and statistics, and far from a compelling case that the death penalty actually deters anything (and an equally [un]compelling case that NRA membership increases the murder rate).
So I did some of my own quick research. Using Figure 1 of the 2004 study, South Carolina experienced the most dramatic “decline” in murder from the study period of 1976 to 1996, with roughly fifty fewer murders per execution. But that looks at total murders, not the murder rate. South Carolina’s murder rate dropped from 11.6 in 1976 to 9.0 in 1996 — a 22.4% decline. By contrast, New York (which executed nobody) dropped from 10.9 to 7.4, or 32.1%. Michigan, the most populous non-death-penalty state, dropped from 11.1 to 7.5 during the study period, a 32.4% decline, more marked that South Carolina’s. And Massachusetts, the next most populous of the non-death-penalty states, dropped from 3.3 to 2.6 in that same period — 21.2%, comparable to South Carolina’s decline (although you’ll notice that the residents of “Taxachusetts” are consistently killing each other at a much lower rate than the other states mentioned). Again using the 2004 study’s Figure 1, the “best” state, South Carolina, experienced a 22.4% drop in the murder rate, while the “worst” state, Utah, dropped by 28.4% — the “worst” state beat the “best.” (Source).
All of this might not specifically identify the “third factor C” that you’re looking for, but it’s certainly pretty solid evidence that execution has little if anything to do with the decline in the murder rate, and that therefore “third factor C,” even if unidentified, is a more likely explanation.
Of course, setting aside the statistics for a moment, the whole idea of capital-punishment-as-deterrent doesn’t even pass the sniff test. How many murderers do you suppose even expect to get caught, much less stop to think about whether or not they may face execution, when they commit their murders? Do you really expect us to believe that a murderer thinks “Gee, I was going to kill you, but since it’s a capital crime, I guess I won’t?” And you really expect us to believe that the possibility of this highly unlikely event justifies wrongly executing people, even if rarely?
Probably the biggest thing I’ve gotten out of this entire exchange, however, is that we should be highly skeptical of research conducted by Emory University’s School of Law.
December 14th, 2005 at 7:46 pm
D’oh!
This should obviously read:
December 14th, 2005 at 10:24 pm
You most certainly did. Had you taken the time to review the thread before throwing out this baseless accusation, you might have noticed that I’ve posted a grand total of two – count ’em, two – comments which relied on the 2001 study to the exclusion of the 2004 one you later introduced. But don’t take my word for it, just follow the links. Or don’t – it’s enough to let your mouse hover over them so you can see the numbers of the comments, assuming you do understand that 41489
December 14th, 2005 at 10:25 pm
You most certainly did. Had you taken the time to review the thread before throwing out this baseless accusation, you might have noticed that I’ve posted a grand total of two – count ’em, two – comments which relied on the 2001 study to the exclusion of the 2004 one you later introduced. But don’t take my word for it, just follow the links. Or don’t – it’s enough to let your mouse hover over them so you can see the numbers of the comments, assuming you do understand that 41489 < 41494 and 41493 < 41494.
I’ll respond to your other arguments just as soon as you retract your frivolous accusation, along with your equally frivolous charge of me having “personally attacked” you merely by pointing out that you were full of crap, when in fact you were.
December 15th, 2005 at 1:51 am
Sigh. If you insist on citing comment numbers, so be it. I noted in comment 41914 that the 2001 study was contradicted at least in part by the 2004 study. You subsequently posted two (count ’em) comments in which you simply don’t address that minute detail. Of course, you could just have a piss-poor understanding of the word “ignore.” Instead, you chose to argue (*gasp!*) semantic nits and failing to get an obvious joke. Then again, if you can show me where I said you were ignoring the 2004 study at the time you cited the 2001 one, then you might be on to something. In fact, I said no such thing.
As my accusation was not frivolous, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for a retraction if I were you. As to personal attacks, your track record in that regard (not just with me, but in general) speaks for itself.
So, sorry to disappoint, I’m not going to take the bait and retract or apologize for anything. Actually, this does you a favor, as it saves you the trouble of coming out from behind your nits to actually address the question at hand.
One aside, though: “Random co-occurrence?” WTF? Almost nobody seems to use that term. What few references I can find are almost exclusively in the field of evolutionary biology, and none of the statistics references I have available to me mention any such term. Of course, it’s mostly irrelevant now, given that upon reading the 2001 study, I realized I’d given them way too much benefit of the doubt in presuming they’d actually established anything resembling a meaningful correlation (even ignoring the possibility of a spurious relationship).
December 15th, 2005 at 1:52 am
“failing” should read “failed.”
December 15th, 2005 at 11:12 am
Sure you did. Specifically, you wrote:
In fact, I had posted two (count ’em, two) comments that could reasonably be said to have “hung my proverbial hat” on the 2001 study, both of which preceded your first comment about the 2004 one. I had also posted two other (count ’em, two other) posts after yours, both of which dealt with an unrelated issue (your struggles with the English language, to be exact), and neither of which had anything to do with murder, the death penalty, or either of the studies in question. When the topic finally did get back to the implications of the 2001 study, I addressed both. So yes, your frivolous accusation was indeed frivolous, though I’m hardly surprised by your stubborn refusal to acknowldge as much. You’re a liberal, after all. Everything is someone else’s fault, so why not this, too?
Fine, use the word “coincidence” instead, if that floats your boat. Or use the word “co-occurrence” alone, if you prefer, but IIRC that word by itself is agnostic as to whether a correlation exists or not. Just don’t use the word “correlation” unless you mean that two things do indeed correlate – and it’s not a coincidence, random co-occurrence, or whatever that the word “correlate” contains the word “relate.”
Equally importantly, if not more so, if an author of a study says A and B “correlate,” then do assume that they mean that, and not that the two merely co-occur. Misusing the word “correlation” in the way you did is a common error among the unwashed masses, but AFAIK it is not commonplace among academics.
December 15th, 2005 at 12:47 pm
And it was at this point at which I stated that you had hung your proverbial hat on the 2001 study (you had, and had not backed away from the statement), and that you had ignored the 2004 study (you had, posting twice without acknowledging it). Seems I’m not the only one who struggles with the English language.
And how did it get back there? Because I dragged it there, and apparently it took the accusation to get enough of your attention to bring you back.
Well, that was kind of my point. I went through the 2001 study, and the authors never actually state that there’s any correlation at all between executions and the number of murders. They essentially use basic arithmetic to come up with a ratio, and one with a remarkably high margin of error (+/-55.6%).
Getting back to the “misuse” of the term “correlation” for a minute, as I said, my biggest mistake was in presuming there even was one, when even the 2001 study’s authors make no such claim. From there, I admittedly should have avoided the use of the term “correlation,” but I didn’t realize we were limiting ourselves to the strictest statistical definitions of terms as opposed to widely established and accepted (if imprecise) defintions commonly used in speech. Bottom line, however, is that we were both wrong to assume any sort of negative correlation between executions and murders.
December 15th, 2005 at 3:41 pm
Hardly. Posting a comment (or two, or any other number) on Topic B is one thing, and “ignoring” a side issue that relates only to Topic A is another (and has nothing to do with B) is quite another.
That may be true, but if it is (i.e., the authors of both studies really did examine a co-occurrence that was so loose that it may be a coincidence rather than strong evidence of a real correlation), then the studies shouldn’t have been published. If, however, the high margin of error in the first study really means each execution might only save 9 lives, or could save as many as 27 on average, then that still means the death penalty is a useful deterrent, at least in the individual states that survive the second study. It would also mean that the 18-1 figure (or, if you prefer, a somewhere-between-9-and-27 to 1 figure) is actually too low for those states that do death right.
December 15th, 2005 at 4:12 pm
Which is why I made my remark about not trusting Emory School of Law studies. Although it also highlights the folly in trusting a single study, no matter what the subject. A study’s results cannot be considered trustworthy until they have been replicated by other researchers.
Of course, all this assumes that the reduction in murders is actually somehow caused by the executions, and neither the 2001 study nor the 2004 study provides anything approaching compelling evidence of this. In fact, if it were true, I would expect a marked difference in the murder rates (or, at least, in the effect on the murder rates) of high-execution states versus their low-execution counterparts; in fact, as demonstrated in detail above, this simply isn’t the case. Even the 2001 study’s Figure 1 seems to contradict its stated results. According to that chart, the murder rates in non-executing states does not substantially differ (and, in fact, is virtually identical) to that in executing states.
Execution-happy Texas has the biggest drop in murder rate of all the states I checked (-36.9%), but its 1996 murder rate remained higher than that of New York (death penalty but no executions) and Michigan (no death penalty). How one concludes from this that the executions are what make the difference is beyond me. Texas’ murder rate fell by a greater percentage not because of some superior deterrence tactic, but because it started off with a lot farther to fall.
December 15th, 2005 at 7:06 pm
Above first paragraph should read “consistently replicated…”
December 15th, 2005 at 11:45 pm
No, but to the extent they produce statistically significant evidence of a correlation, that correlation will have to be explained somehow. State to state comparisons are next to useless, unless you have a system for excluding a gazillion noise factors, e.g., change all the laws you want in both states, but Vermont will never be Texas. Intrastate comparisons, before and after the death penalty law changed significantly, may be more interesting, particularly for states like Texas that went from 0 to 60 in 30 seconds. New York, not so much, whether you rely on the 2001 study (0 executions x 18 lives saved per execution = 0 lives saved) or the 2004 one (only states that use the death penalty a lot more than 0 times get the benefit). If Texas’s big drop happened during a period in which its execution rate was relatively stable, I see little reason to attribute the drop to the death penalty. But if it happened precipitously in the years immediately following the death penalty’s enactment, or following the first year in which executions actually got carried out on a regular basis, then it seems reasonable to argue that Texas’s death penalty had something to do with its decrease in the murder rate – just not enough to make up for all the other extraneous factors that make Michigan or New York safer.
December 16th, 2005 at 4:15 pm
I’m not entirely sure I agree with this. Admittedly, there are a lot of factors that may vary from state to state, but on the whole, if one state dramatically differs in a given category from the other states, this would indicate something worth looking at. Conversely, if a single state’s crime rate changes are largely consistent with a broader nationwide trend, that wouldn’t seem to indicate that this state is somehow doing something “better” than the others. So, from that perspective, state-to-state comparisons can tell us a little something, if not offer a definitive picture. And I think you agree, because if you didn’t, you wouldn’t care one whit about the 2001 study, which engages exclusively in state-to-state comparisons.
If that held, I would argue that it’s reasonable to argue that the death penalty may have had something to do with it, but I don’t think you could draw any sort of conclusion from that alone. But in Texas’ case, the evidence is far from even. The murder rate in Texas peaked at 16.9 in 1980, coincidental in timing with the national trend (the nation’s rate peaked in 1980, albeit at a much-lower 10.2). By 1982, when Texas executed its first post-1976 convict (and only one that year), the murder rate had dropped to 16.1 (about a 5% drop), and by 1983 (a year in which Texas executed nobody), the rate had dropped an additional 11.8% to 14.2, a total drop of 16% from the 1980 peak. The nation’s drop was about 11% over the same period.
Highlighting another flaw in the 2001 study, there were actually 74 more murders in 1982 than in 1980; the influx of additional population obscured that number and resulted in a lower execution rate.
Here’s a year-by-year list of Texas’ murder rate against its executions since 1980:
Year / Murders / Murder Rate / Exectutions / Δ Murders / Δ Rate / Δ Executions
1980 / 2,392 / 16.9 / 0 / – / – / –
1981 / 2,446 / 16.6 / 0 / 54 / -0.3 / 0
1982 / 2,466 / 16.1 / 1 / 20 / -0.5 / 1
1983 / 2,239 / 14.2 / 0 / -227 / -1.9 / -1
1984 / 2,093 / 13.1 / 3 / -146 / -1.1 / 3
1985 / 2,132 / 13 / 6 / 39 / -0.1 / 3
1986 / 2,258 / 13.5 / 10 / 126 / 0.5 / 4
1987 / 1,959 / 11.7 / 6 / -299 / -1.8 / -4
1988 / 2,022 / 12.1 / 3 / 63 / 0.4 / -3
1989 / 2,029 / 11.9 / 4 / 7 / -0.2 / 1
1990 / 2,389 / 14.1 / 4 / 360 / 2.2 / 0
1991 / 2,652 / 15.3 / 5 / 263 / 1.2 / 1
1992 / 2,239 / 12.7 / 12 / -413 / -2.6 / 7
1993 / 2,147 / 11.9 / 17 / -92 / -0.8 / 5
1994 / 2,022 / 11 / 14 / -125 / -0.9 / -3
1995 / 1,693 / 9 / 19 / -329 / -2 / 5
1996 / 1,477 / 7.7 / 3 / -216 / -1.3 / -16
1997 / 1,327 / 6.8 / 37 / -150 / -0.9 / 34
1998 / 1,346 / 6.8 / 20 / 19 / 0 / -17
1999 / 1,217 / 6.1 / 35 / -129 / -0.7 / 15
2000 / 1,238 / 5.9 / 40 / 21 / -0.2 / 5
Now maybe there’s some sort of compelling pattern here, but I don’t see it. The murder rate went down in all but four of those years, and the absolute number of murders fluctuates, mostly (but not always) going down. But I don’t see any relationship between the number of executions and the murder rate or the number of murders.
Even if you assume executions are wholly responsible for the decline in murder rate (an ambitious assumption, to say the least), Texas doesn’t come close to the 18-to-1 ratio. The best ratio I could come up with under that too-generous assumption was 9.95-to-1, in the state that does the most executions. (I suppose you could argue that there’s a threshold at which you can commit too many executions, diminishing the deterrent effect, and that Texas has crossed that threshold…)
Bottom line is, I’m no statistician, and I don’t even play one on TV, but from every objective measure I know how to apply, the “18 murders prevented per execution” number is complete crap. I think if you took a detailed look at the 2001 study, you’d be inclined to agree that it’s sloppy, and that the methodology is questionable at best. I don’t expect this to diminish your support for the death penalty, but I do expect it would give you pause before citing the study or the purported 18-to-1 deterrence factor.