Is the death penalty worth it?

Lack of quorum in the House of Representatives is reported to be snagging the effort of administration supporters in Congress to restore the death penalty. The 1987 Philippine Constitution rules against the death penalty, but gives Congress the authority to impose it “for compelling reasons involving heinous crimes.” In the wake of rising criminality, Congress passed Republic Act No. 7659 in late 1993 listing 46 crimes (later increased to 52) as punishable by death, and executions resumed in 1999. RA 9346 subsequently suspended the death penalty in 2006, and that is where the matter stands to this day.

I will not address the moral and ethical element of the issue here, even as I personally believe that no one, not even the state, has the right to take a human life. For those who do not care enough about the moral dimension (and there are too many among us who don’t), we might simply address the matter on a practical level and ask: Is it worth it? The question may be approached in two ways. One is to ask: Will it really work to deter, hence reduce, heinous crimes? We can also take a clinical view of the issue and ask: Do the economic benefits of imposing the death penalty outweigh the costs?

On the first question, the appeal of the death penalty to its proponents lies in its expected deterrence effect. The general premise is that if the punishment is great enough, people will choose not to commit an illegal act. It’s easy enough to believe that if speeding on the highways is meted a mandatory prison sentence (never mind the fairness of it), few drivers would dare exceed the speed limit. But this effect becomes open to question with higher levels of crime and punishment, and as hardened criminals become the decision makers.

There is much historical experience suggesting that the death penalty does not really reduce crimes. The Capital Punishment Research Project in the United States found no statistically significant decrease in murders in the state of New Jersey before and after the death penalty was imposed in 1982. The number of murders per 100,000 residents in New York (no death penalty at the time) did not differ significantly from that in Texas (with death penalty), or between New Jersey (with) and Massachusetts (without). The study also observed that while most southern states had the death penalty, they also had higher murder rates, and Louisiana, even with the death penalty, had the highest murder rate nationwide. Here at home, the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism notes: “In 1999, the bumper year for executions, the national crime volume ironically increased by 15.3 percent or a total of 82,538 (from 71,527 crimes in the previous year).”

Economists would approach the question by assessing costs against expected benefits. Benefits from imposing the death penalty would include deterrence, reduced crowding in prisons, savings on costs of sustaining life-termers, and indirect benefits on the rest of society (which can potentially be quite large). Costs would include expenses incurred starting with police investigation through the legal processes including trial, sentencing, appeal, and up to execution itself; various opportunity costs like foregone output of convicts (from prison labor), and from the time spent by all involved in the legal processes; and the cost of the possibility of executing the innocent. Studies done on various states in America indicate that direct financial analysis of the additional costs of legal processes involved in death-eligible crimes makes the death penalty a great fiscal burden not worth assuming. Such analysis may not be applicable to the Philippines’ less rigorous (and less disciplined) judicial system. It can also be extremely difficult to put numbers on the indirect benefits and costs described above. As no hard-nosed economic cost-benefit assessment on the death penalty appears to have been done in the Philippine setting, we have no firm basis from this type of clinical analysis on the question. But then most of us probably feel that the question on the death penalty was never one of economics in the first place.

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