the death penalty doesn't deter, it's revenge, an eye for an eye. plain and simple. it also means that at least one innocent person will wrongly be on death row because as we know, innocent people have already been put to death.
this from the NYT:
To economists, it is obvious that if the cost of an activity rises, the amount of the activity will drop.
“To say anything else is to brand yourself an imbecile,” said Professor Wolfers, an author of the Stanford Law Review article criticizing the death penalty studies. To many economists, then, it follows inexorably that there will be fewer murders as the likelihood of execution rises.
“I am definitely against the death penalty on lots of different grounds,” said Joanna Shepherd, a law professor at Emory with a doctorate in economics who wrote or contributed to several studies. “But I do believe that people respond to incentives.”
But not everyone agrees that potential murderers know enough or can think clearly
enough to make rational calculations. And the chances of being caught, convicted, sentenced to death and executed are in any event quite remote. Only about one in 300 homicides results in an execution.“I honestly think it’s a distraction,” Professor Wolfers said. “The debate here is over whether we kill 60 guys or not. The food stamps program is much more important.”
