Capital Punishment: Is It Just and Effective Directly addressing two of the most important objections to the death penalty is the subject of this article: Is the death penalty a miscarriage of justice? And does it deter crime? It is a miscarriage of justice. In an investigation by professors Hugo Adam Bedau and Michael Radelet it emerged that in the United States between 1900 and 1985 7000 people were executed and that 35 were innocent of capital crimes (1). Among the innocents are Sacco and Vanzetti as well as Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. While their data may be questionable, I have no doubt that, for a long enough period, miscarriages of justice will occur even in capital cases. Despite precautions, almost all human activities, such as trucking, lighting or construction, cost the lives of people and innocent bystanders. We do not give up these activities, because the benefits, moral or material, outweigh the involuntary losses (2). Similarly, for those who believe the death penalty is just, miscarriages of justice are outweighed by the moral benefits and utility of doing justice. For those who believe the death penalty is unjust even when it fails, abortions are unlikely to be decisive. Is it a deterrent? Despite much recent work, there is no conclusive statistical demonstration that the death penalty is a better deterrent than alternative punishments (3). However, deterrence is far from decisive for either side. Most abolitionists recognize that they would continue to favor abolition even if the death penalty were shown to deter more murder than the alternatives could (4). Abolitionists seem to place a higher value on the life of a convicted murderer, or at least on his failure to execute it, than they place, however fair, on murderers. But while there is lively discussion on the topic, there is no serious evidence to support the hypothesis that executions produce a higher murder rate. See Phllips, the deterrent effect of capital punishment: new evidence on an old controversy, 86 am. J.Soc. 139 (1980) (arguing that the murder rate declines immediately after the execution of criminals).6 H. Gross, A Theory of Criminal Justice 489 (1979) (attributing this passage to Sir James Fitzjames Stephen).7 Weems v. United States, 217 US 349 (1910) suggests that penalties be proportionate to the severity of the crime – a common theme in criminal law. Murder, therefore, requires more than life imprisonment. In modern times, our sensibilities require that the range of punishments be narrower than that of crimes, but not so narrow as to exclude the death penalty..