The expression “even hardened convicts are scared of death” fails to show that the death penalty is a deterrent to the commission of “heinous” crimes because it is a statement of convicts after they have committed the offense.
The “fear of death” of convicts does not refer to the death penalty but their apprehension about their personal safety while in prison from attacks of fellow inmates like in the case of drug lord Jaybee Sebastian.
Moreover, this expression coming from a convict is a post-crime commission which is irrelevant to deterrence.
Empirical data show that a person who deliberately commits a crime does not think beforehand of the imposable penalty.
With more reason, reckoning the capital punishment is remotest to a person who commits a crime at the spur of the moment or under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
Amnesty International concludes that “The threat of execution at some future date is unlikely to enter the minds of those acting under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol, those who are in the grip of fear or rage, those who are panicking while committing another crime (such as a robbery), or those who suffer from mental illness or mental retardation and do not fully understand the gravity of their crime.”
In a 2009 study entitled Smart on Crime: Reconsidering the Death Penalty in a Time of Economic Crisis, American police chiefs rank the death penalty last in their priorities for effective crime reduction. In the study, the top cops of the United States do not believe the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder, and even rated it as “one of most inefficient uses of taxpayer dollars in fighting crime”.
A survey of experts from the American Society of Criminology, the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, and the Law and Society Association also showed that the overwhelming majority of criminologists themselves or over 80% did not believe that the death penalty is a proven deterrent to homicide (M. Radelet and R. Akers, Deterrence and the Death Penalty: The Views of the Experts, 1995).
EDCEL C. LAGMAN