Seattle City Council, Mayor push anti-death penalty propaganda

In a brazen attempt to shoehorn themselves into another issue they’ve got no business being involved in, the Seattle City Council and Mayor Ed Murray have called on the Seattle delegation to the state Legislature to abolish the death penalty in the state of Washington.

“There is no credible evidence showing that the death penalty deters homicide or makes our communities safer,” the letter says.

They argue money spent on death penalty cases and executions could be better spent. They say that the cost to the state is several million.

Now, in a separate editorial for The Stranger, council president Tim Burgess writes, “the death penalty delivers nothing more than a false promise.”

And he argues that despite some folks believing they’re safer with the death penalty out there to punish criminals, they’re not actually safer.

He writes, “The death penalty does not deter homicides and does not make our communities safer. A review from the National Research Council concludes that no credible evidence exists to suggest that it does.”

This is a mostly ideological issue. If you’re a Republican, you tend to support the death penalty. If you’re a Democrat, you tend not to. For independents it’s a mixed bag, but national polling has always favored the death penalty.

With the exception of 1965, according to Gallup Polling, Americans have always overwhelmingly supported the death penalty – the latest number coming in at 63 percent, about the same it’s been on average over the last 10 years or so.

When you’re talking about an issue where your position is informed by an ideology, you tend to make arguments that don’t necessarily reflect fact. When Burgess says “the death penalty delivers nothing more than a false promise” and that “the National Research Council concludes that no credible evidence exists to suggest that it does” he’s not exactly being forthcoming.

For example, the way he writes the editorial, you’d believe the National Research Council is against the death penalty because there’s no evidence suggesting it works. But what they actual say – and what Burgess doesn’t tell you – is that there’s not only a lack of evidence that the death penalty deters crime, it’s that there’s also no evidence that it doesn’t deter crime.

It’s not saying the death penalty is a failure. It’s saying the studies they looked at can’t state it’s effectiveness either way.

They wrote, “The committee concludes that research to date on the effect of capital punishment on homicide is not informative about whether capital punishment decreases, increases, or has no effect on homicide rates.”

As USA Today states, “Just because the committee found no studies supporting a deterrent effect from the death penalty for murderers doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist, the report says, or that other reasons for, or against, capital punishment might reasonably affect lawmaker’s decisions: “Deterrence is but one of many considerations relevant to deciding whether the death penalty is good public policy.”

Burgess didn’t mention all that, did he? Why? Because he’s making an ideological case and when you do that, you tend to leave out all the data, especially data that may make your case a little harder to prove.

To suggest there’s no data out there in support of the death penalty is demonstrably incorrect.

In 2008, Drexel University economist Bijou Yang and psychologist David Lester of Richard Stockton College of New Jersey concluded that since 1975, the majority of studies that looked into the effect of the death penalty found it to be a deterrent.

According to economist Paul Zimmerman, each state execution deters about 14 murders a year. Kenneth Land of Duke University found that over a 10 year time period, every execution in Texas was associated with 2.5 less murders. In 2003, Emory University researchers looked at the data globally and found that, on average, every execution results in 18 fewer murders per county they looked at.

Now you can say maybe all this data is wrong or flawed – fair enough. But that means any data points the council uses should be equally criticized. If you have no data either way to support the death penalty, well look at another angle.

You will never fully prove it to be a deterrent because unless you have the pre-cogs from Minority Report out there, you can’t prove someone would have otherwise murdered someone had it not been for the death penalty.

So we look at other things. We know that the homicide rate, on average, has been down. We know that, with few exceptions, the people who have faced the death penalty tend not to actually want to die. They willingly go through appeal after appeal and on the day of their death, they fight the ultimate punishment and break down when they realize they’ll be put to death. You mean to tell me that has no impact on behavior?

Why do you and I refuse to do a lot of things? We stop out of fear of punishment. I’d love to jaywalk, but if a cop is nearby, I won’t. I would love to go 90 miles an hour on I-5 to get to the outlet mall in Tulalip when there’s no traffic, but I don’t because I fear a ticket. Now, I’m not stopping myself from murder because of the punishment. I have no interest in murder because I don’t believe in it and I try to be a moral, religious person. But to suggest that bad guys aren’t susceptible to fear is just silly and goes against basic human nature.

Now, whether or not you support the death penalty is up to you. I don’t care where you stand. I just care that you make an honest case. You can bring up costs associated with it, as does the council, but let’s not pretend that data is on either side and let’s not pretend this is a black-and-white issue.

Let’s all remember this is yet another topic that the council and the mayor are getting involved in to simply symbolically show how progressive they are. While I’m up for the debate on this topic, I’m a talk show host who gets to move from topic to topic. How about the council, you know, legislate and fix issues they actually have a say in.