WALTER C. RECKLESS MEMORIAL LECTURE Death and Deterrence Redux: Science, Law and Causal Reasoning on Capital Punishment

Long before the U.S. Supreme Court restored capital punishment in 1976, proponents of the death penalty claimed that executions save lives by deterring would-be murderers from lethal violence. The more recent ascension of deterrence as a rationale for capital punishment in the 1970s coincided with a series of landmark Supreme Court cases that first abolished and then reinstated the death penalty (a list of cases is available), and with the publication of a series of articles that claimed a scientific basis for the assertion that potential murderers can be deterred from homicide by the threat of execution. The originator of these claims was economist Isaac Ehrlich, who (inspired by the theoretical work of the University of Chicago’s Gary Becker) developed a theoretical model that explained crime as a process of rational choice between illegal and legal behavior; the choices were shaped by how law enforcement reacted to illegal activities. Such rationality, Ehrlich argued, would influence would-be offenders to avoid punishment and forego crime. Ehrlich published a highly influential article in 1975 that tested this model in the case of murder and capital punishment. It was a technical piece using