Does the death penalty save lives? Assume for the sake of discussion that the death penalty *does* save lives: Would that be a reason for a faithful Catholic to support the death penalty? If not, why not?
As a point of departure as you pursue this inquiry, read the following article:
New York Times
November 18, 2007
Does Death Penalty Save Lives? A New Debate
By ADAM LIPTAK
For the first time in a
generation, the question of whether the death penalty deters murders
has captured the attention of scholars in law and economics, setting
off an intense new debate about one of the central justifications for
capital punishment.
According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives.
For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are
prevented.
The effect is most pronounced, according to some studies, in Texas
and other states that execute condemned inmates relatively often and
relatively quickly.
The studies, performed by economists in the past decade, compare the
number of executions in different jurisdictions with homicide rates
over time — while trying to eliminate the effects of crime rates,
conviction rates and other factors — and say that murder rates tend to
fall as executions rise. One influential study looked at 3,054 counties
over two decades.
“I personally am opposed to the death penalty,” said H. Naci Mocan,
an economist at Louisiana State University and an author of a study
finding that each execution saves five lives. “But my research shows
that there is a deterrent effect.”
The studies have been the subject of sharp criticism, much of it
from legal scholars who say that the theories of economists do not
apply to the violent world of crime and punishment. Critics of the
studies say they are based on faulty premises, insufficient data and
flawed methodologies.
The death penalty “is applied so rarely that the number of homicides
it can plausibly have caused or deterred cannot reliably be
disentangled from the large year-to-year changes in the homicide rate
caused by other factors,” John J. Donohue III, a law professor at Yale
with a doctorate in economics, and Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in the Stanford Law Review in 2005. “The existing evidence for deterrence,” they concluded, “is surprisingly fragile.”
Gary Becker, who won the Nobel Prize
in economics in 1992 and has followed the debate, said the current
empirical evidence was “certainly not decisive” because “we just don’t
get enough variation to be confident we have isolated a deterrent
effect.”
But, Mr. Becker added, “the evidence of a variety of types — not
simply the quantitative evidence — has been enough to convince me that
capital punishment does deter and is worth using for the worst sorts of
offenses.”
[To read the rest of this interesting, important article, click here.]
Thursday, November 15, 2007
There's an interesting discussion of abortion and the law over at dotCommonweal--a discussion that includes, in the comments, a link to a provocative article in America. MOJ-readers will be interested. Here.
This new artricle is worthy of note. (The article is not [yet] available for downloading/printing.]:
| Homelessness and the Missing Constitutional Dimension of
Fraternity |
R. GEORGE WRIGHT
Indiana University Purdue University
Indianapolis (IUPUI)
Louisville Law Review, Forthcoming
|
| |
Abstract:
This Article seeks to
deepen our understanding of the lack of constitutional protection against
long-term involuntary homelessness. There are a number of powerful moral
justifications for constitutionally addressing homelessness, but the lack of any
constitutional response continues. It has been observed often that the
Constitution emboides mainly negative, as opposed to positive, rights, or rights
prohibiting government interference rather than rights requiring some costly
government provision. But underlying this kind of explanation is the fact that
our constitutional focus on rights, and on liberty and equality in particular,
is actually part of the problem. Homelessness is certainly linked in various
ways to lack of liberty and equality, but as the Article argues, liberty and
equality carefully understood are not central to the most crucial dimensions of
homelessness. Homelessness is actually more precisely a problem of lack of
fraternity, or solidarity, than of liberty or equality. Our Constitution,
however, follows the French Revolution slogan in emphasizing liberty and
equality, but not fraternity, to the detriment of the homeless. The Article
tracks the welcome but inevitably inadequate litigation on behalf of the
homeless in the absence of constitutional fraternity, and considers finally some
problems of implementation that are in principle resolvable in the presence of
genuine fraternity.
|
Wednesday, November 14, 2007
Many MOJ-readers will be interested in a new paper Steve Smith recently posted on SSRN. I know that Steve would welcome any comments readers might have: [email protected]
Click here to download/print the paper.
| How
Secularists Helped Knock Down the Wall of Separation between Church and
State |
STEVEN DOUGLAS SMITH
University of San Diego School of Law
November 8, 2007
San Diego Legal Studies Paper No.
07-124 |
| |
Abstract:
An increasingly common
view maintains that the legendary “wall of separation between church and state”
has fallen into a state of serious disrepair. There is also a widely voiced
opinion about who deserves the blame, or the credit, for this development: the
people ostensibly responsible for the wall's decline are religious
conservatives, working through and upon the Republican Party and Republican
appointees to the federal bench. In this article, I argue that this ascription
of responsibility is fundamentally misleading. Complacently offered or accepted,
it does a serious disservice to our understanding of the long-term causal
influences that have combined to subvert the commitment to church-state
separation and also, more generally, to our understanding of the situation we
currently occupy and the prospects that may be available to us.
Indeed,
from a more detached perspective, the diagnosis ascribing the decay of the wall
of separation to religious believers and their political representatives is
almost exactly wrong. It would be more accurate, ultimately, to attribute the
declining fortunes of the wall - and the principle of separation - to
secularists and secular influences (in a modern sense of the term) than to
religion.
Part I of the article (“Foundations: Separation and the
Classical 'Secular'”) attempts to explain three things: what “secular” meant in
its premodern or classical sense, how the “secular” in that classical sense gave
rise to a jurisdictional question affecting church and state, and how a
commitment to “separation of church and state” and a derivative commitment to
freedom of conscience expressed the generally shared classical response to that
jurisdictional question. Part II (“Dissolution: Separation, Conscience, and the
Modern 'Secular'”) follows the same order, attempting to explain how the concept
of the “secular” was transformed into its modern sense of “not religious,” how
the modern sense of the secular dissolved the earlier question of jurisdiction
and replaced it with a question of justice, and how this transformation has
altered and significantly undermined the classical commitments to “separation of
church and state” and freedom of conscience. Part III (“Phasing out the Wall”)
discusses the stages in which the reduction of the wall - of the commitments to
separation of church and state and freedom of conscience - has proceeded in
modern American jurisprudence. The Conclusion reflects briefly on the
alternatives that may be available to us now.
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