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Commentary and Debate
REFERENCES
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A COMMENT ON THE DETERRENT EFFECT OF
CAPITAL PUNISHMENT BY PHILLIPS
Scholarly papers that claim to have found evidence of a deterrent effect of
the death penalty quickly find their way into the general media and from
there to the prosecutors and the arguments they make in courts, thus ac-
quiring an importance far transcending the normal attention paid to aca-
demic endeavors. Any such claim, therefore, deserves scrutiny.
The latest such claim is made by David P. Phillips in his paper The
Deterrent Effect of Capital Punishment (AIS 86 [July 1980]: 139-48).
There he reports his analysis of the effect of 22 publicized executions that
took place in England between 1858 and 1921. The effect he found is suc-
cinctly described in figure 1 (p. 145). It is summarized by the statement
that homicides are temporarily deterred . . .; then the temporarily deterred
homicides reappear (p. 145). Phillips believes this to be the first com-
pelling statistical evidence that capital punishment does deter homicides for
a short time (p. 139). Compelling or not, two earlier studies of the prob-
lem deserved better than Phillips's footnote 5 that dismisses them as in-
conclusive (p. 140). Savitz (1968) tried to find an effect of executions on
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