With the Tookie Williams execution, the media have been abuzz with the debate over capital punishment. For me, the effect has been to need to stifle the urge to write a long post on the subject, answering all the arguments that have bothered me lately -- ranging from the lame to the pathologically dishonest.

But there's one I've never been sure of: deterrence. Does capital punishment have a deterrent effect?

I've never been opposed to capital punishment in theory, but have had many reservations about it's actual practice. When I was younger, I had heard, and fully believed, that the death sentence had no effect whatsoever. But I have learned that most everything political I absorbed from the media and culture in my earlier life was wrong, so I'm half-expecting to find out I was indeed wrong about this also.

So imagine my complete lack of surprise when I finally came across evidence to the contrary: If this study has any credence, I was indeed quite misled:

Our results suggest that capital punishment has a strong deterrent effect; each execution results, on average, in 18 fewer murders - with a margin of error of plus or minus 10. Tests show that results are not driven by tougher sentencing laws, and are also robust to many alternative specifications.

If you have evidence this is wrong, I'd appreciate a link to it.

Another argument which I knew immediately, at a gut level, was wrong was the new claim I'm hearing out of Europe that Europe abolished the death penalty after WWII, as a horrified reaction to the Nazis' use of it. The way I heard it presented, it sounded like another lame way to try to make the specious USA = Nazis argument.

(In response, one conservative noted that Europe had a penchant for taking behavior which should be to its own shame and turning into lofty moral perch from which to look down upon and preach to others.)

I knew England had abolished the death penalty long after WWII -- 1971 (France, 1981) -- so I found it highly improbable that European opposition to the death penalty had anything to do with Nazis.

(Otherwise, that's one very slow reaction to Nazi atrocities! More likely, that's the left trying to do their usual Orwellian rewrite of history.)

Further evidence reveals that, once again, Europe or the media (whoever came up with that lame argument) has the story entirely backward:

Significantly, such civilized nations as the Danes and the Norwegians, which had abolished the death penalty before the First World War, restored it after 1945 in order to deal equitable justice to the Nazis and their collaborators.

So to the contrary, European nations actually favored the death penalty after their experience with the Nazis!

And I hate to push the Nazi thing any further, given how Europe is so grossly abusing it, but it's significant to note that one of the things Adolf and his friends actually did was to create and spread a ficticious version of European and Germany history, with each modification designed to forward a political policy or demonize a national enemy.

It's amazing to me that people can't see this happening again.