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29 J. Quantitative Criminology 1 (2013)

handle is hein.journals/jquantc29 and id is 1 raw text is: J Quant Criminol (2013) 29:1 3 DOI 10.1007/s10940-012-9167-9 I I I n I, k I I Introduction Daniel Nagin Published online: 24 February 2012 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012 This special issue of the Journal of Quantitative Criminology is committed to the publi- cation of papers commissioned by the National Research Council's Committee on Deterrence and the Death Penalty. In 1976, the Supreme Court decision Gregg v. Georgia, 428 US 153 ended the four-year moratorium on executions that resulted from its 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia, 408 US 238. In the immediate aftermath of Gregg, an earlier report of the National Research Council by Blumstein, Cohen, and Nagin (1978) reviewed the evidence relating to the deterrent effect of the death penalty that had been gathered through the mid-1970s. That review was highly critical of the earlier research and concluded (1978:9) that available studies provide no useful evidence on the deterrent effect of capital punishment. During the thirty-five years since Gregg, and particularly in the past decade, many additional studies have renewed the attempt to estimate the effect of capital punishment on homicide rates. Most researchers have used post-Gregg data from the US to examine the statistical association between homicide rates and the legal status and/or the actual implementation of the death penalty. The studies have reached widely varying, even contradictory, conclusions. Some studies conclude that executions save large numbers of lives whereas others conclude that executions actually increase homicides and still others conclude that executions have no effect on homicide. Commentary on the scientific validity of the findings has sometimes been acrimonious. The Committee on Deterrence and the Death Penalty was convened against this backdrop of conflicting claims about the effect of capital punishment on homicide rates. The Committee report which is a publication of the National Academy Press (NRC, forthcoming), addressed three main questions laid out in its charge: 1. Does the available evidence provide a reasonable basis for drawing conclusions about the magnitude of capital punishment's effect on homicide rates? 2. Are there differences among the extant analyses that provide a basis for resolving the differences in findings? Are the differences in findings due to inherent limitations in the data? Are there existing statistical methods and/or theoretical perspectives that D. Nagin (E) Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA e-mail: dnO3@andrew.cmu.edu Springer

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