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32 Criminology 107 (1994)
Deterrence or Brutalization - An Impact Assessment of Oklahoma's Return to Capital Punishment

handle is hein.journals/crim32 and id is 117 raw text is: DETERRENCE OR BRUTALIZATION? AN IMPACT ASSESSMENT OF OKLAHOMA'S RETURN TO CAPITAL PUNISHMENT* JOHN K. COCHRAN University of Oklahoma MITCHELL B. CHAMLIN University of Cincinnati MARK SETH University of Oklahoma On September 10, 1990 Charles Troy Coleman was put to death by lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. Coleman's execu- tion was the first in the state in more than 25 years, generating signifi- cant media coverage and providing a unique opportunity to assess the impact of the state's return to executing capital offenders. Interrupted time-series analyses are performed with weekly data from the UCR Supplemental Homicide Reports for the state for the period January 1989 through December; 1991. Analyses are performed for the total level of criminal homicides and homicides disaggregated into two types of murder-felony murder and stranger homicides-testing hypotheses that predict opposing impacts for each type of homicide. As predicted, no evidence of a deterrent or a brutalization effect is found for criminal homicides in general. Similarly, the predicted deterrent effect of the execution on the level of felony murders is not observed. Evidence of the predicted brutalization effect on the level of stranger homicides is observed, however. Supplementary analyses on further offense disag- gregations continue to support these initial findings and permit a more coherent interpretation of the results. On September 10, 1990 Charles Troy Coleman, a white male convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to death, was executed by lethal * Cochran and Chamlin contributed equally to this work and jointly share first authorship. Presented at the annual meetings of the American Society of Criminology, held in New Orleans, November 4-7, 1992. We would like to thank Mr. Raymond Pascutti, Uniform Crime Reporting Supervisor for the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, for kindly providing the data for this analysis; we would also like to acknowledge the helpful comments of Drs. Robert J. Bursik, Jr., Harold G. Grasmick, and the anonymous reviewers who read earlier drafts of the manuscript. Please submit any correspondence to John K. Cochran at the following address: Department of Sociology, University of Oklahoma, Norman, OK 73019. CRIMINOLOGY VOLUME 32 NUMBER 1 1994

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