Excerpt from Crime and Capital Punishment: Some Recent Studies
In November, 1976, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, arguably the most liberal state in the nation, put a gun-control proposition on its ballot. The proposal was defeated by what Newsweek called "a stunning 3-1 margin." Presumably a question on the same ballot about restoring the death penalty would not have fared so badly, for a capital punishment bill had sailed through the Massachusetts Legislature, which failed later by only one vote to override the Governor's veto. In December, 1976, New Jersey became the 35th state since 1972 to pass new laws that provided capital sanctions in certain homicide cases.
The events in Massachusetts and the rest of the nation make clear that, rightly or wrongly, the restoration of capital punishment has become the linchpin of the American people's response to the doubling of murder rates in the last decade. Gun control measures, attempts to reduce media violence, and more general social and economic reforms have been accorded a much lower priority in the national consensus. It seems probable that, first erratically, then more regularly, executions will take place in America throughout the forseeable future.
It seems fair to say that America's historical experience with the death penalty - which includes thousands of executions earlier this century - has had minimal net impact on the evolving national decision to restore capital punishment. The Supreme Court, for example, in its 1976 decision authorizing the resumption of executions, stressed that it had reached no conclusions on whether past executions had served to deter murders. It would be one thing if this situation arose because those who had studied past murder and execution data found them inherently inconclusive on deterrence questions.
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