ANTONIO P. CONTRERAS THE theory is that the prospect of being executed will cast an unimaginable fear in the heart of a criminal enough to make him stop. But the jury is still out on this. A review of researches over a 34-year period on the deterrent effect of the death penalty conducted by a committee of the American National Academy of Sciences National Review Council points to the inconclusiveness of the claim that capital punishment indeed deters crime. Eighty-eight percent of crime scientists interviewed in a 2009 survey conducted among members of the American Criminology Society, using not their personal opinions, but instead basing their responses on their assessment of the empirical...
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