Capital Punishment in Australia

The approach I am taking to evaluate the effect of capital punishment on a nation's murder rate is an experimental approach. Specifically, I ask: what happens to the murder rate when executions cease, and what happens when they resume? I do not base my analyses on the year in which a law was passed outlawing capital punishment. Instead, I base them on the year in which capital punishment stopped being enforced because it is my belief that executions -- not unenforced laws -- might serve as a deterrent to murder.

Only America conducted the complete experiment by first eliminating and then bringing back the practice, but a number of nations that are culturally similar to America conducted the first part of the experiment by abolishing enforcement of the death penalty. In America, the murder rate increased when executions ceased. In Canada, the same trend was observed despite the frequent claim that the opposite was observed.

If the same trend is observed repeatedly across different culturally similar nations, then it becomes increasingly plausible to argue that there is a causal connection between the enforcement of capital punishment and a reduction in the murder rate (or, equivalently, between the elimination of capital punishment and an increase in the murder rate). That's the rationale behind the analyses that I have been conducting of late.

The results from America and Canada could not be more clear. What happened in Australia when executions ceased? The death penalty for murder in Australia was abolished in 1973, but the last person executed in Australia was in 1967 (and, as I said before, it is the enforcement of capital punishment, not an abstract, unenforced law, that deters murder). What happened to the murder rate in Australia in the years after the last execution in 1967? It went up (data found on page 9 of this report):


The red line marks the last year that someone was executed in Australia. You don't need a Ph.D. in statistics to see that the murder rate was stable between 1952 and 1967 but started to increase right after that. It could be a coincidence, but the number of coincidences are starting to add up. It happened in America, in Canada, and -- as the above graph makes clear -- in Australia. In each case, when capital punishment stopped being enforced, the murder rate began to climb -- either immediately or within a few years.

As I noted yesterday, when Canada stopped executing murderers in 1962, the murder rate when up. When they finally outlawed the practice in 1976, the murder rate began a slow decline for reasons having nothing to do with the death penalty. Many people failed to notice that executions stopped long before the death penalty was outlawed, so they gleefully connected the drop in Canada's murder rate to the elimination of the death penalty. Here are some of many, many examples:

Amnesty International:

Contrary to predictions by death penalty supporters, the homicide rate in Canada did not increase after abolition in 1976. In fact, the Canadian murder rate declined slightly the following year (from 2.8 per 100,000 to 2.7). Over the next 20 years the homicide rate fluctuated (between 2.2 and 2.8 per 100,000), but the general trend was clearly downwards.

Death Penalty Information Center:

Homicide Rates Fall in Canada After Abolition of Death Penalty

The abolition of the death penalty in Canada in 1976 has not led to increased homicide rates. Statistics Canada reports that the number of homicides in Canada in 2001 (554) was 23% lower than the number of homicides in 1975 (721), the year before the death penalty was abolished.

National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty:

The murder rate in Canada has dropped by 40% since the death penalty was abolished in that country in 1976.

Legal Arguments Against the Death Penalty:

by Professor David L. Gregory
St. John's University, School of Law
Canada abolished capital punishment in 1975, yet the murder rate in Canada declined consistently over the next decade.

The reason I mention this is that it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that many people take the experimental approach seriously, even if the result they focus on was observed in a single country. And they should take the experimental approach seriously and let it affect their views. The only problem is that they all made the mistake of assuming that executions ceased when Canada outlawed capital punishment. In fact, executions had ceased 14 years earlier. Using the exact same reasoning that death penalty opponents have already shown themselves to be fond of (appropriately enough), the results clearly show the opposite of what they initially seemed to show. Removing the enforcement of the death penalty is followed by an increase in the murder rate, and it is not just Canada that exhibits that trend. Canada, Australia and America all show the same result. If you don't believe me, it's easy enough to go collect the data and check for yourself (links to the primary data sources are provided in every one of my posts).

Tomorrow, I'll present the results of my inquiry into the British experience with capital punishment. They, too, performed the relevant experiment. Care to guess what happened when they stopped enforcing capital punishment? As you contemplate your prediction, let common sense be your guide.