Having crested midyear, we're on the downward slope to 2020. Approaching a year whose numerals symbolize perfect vision is a good time to consider sharpening the national focus on America's most damaging cancer: violent crime.
After skyrocketing to Third World country levels in some cities in the 1990s, the overall rate of criminal violence has fallen dramatically. But it stubbornly remains a multiple of what it was when John F. Kennedy challenged the nation to put a man on the moon.
The 50th anniversary of that crowning achievement is Saturday, and since that time there's been a giant leap in violent crime. Tomorrow 50 Americans will be murdered and thousands more robbed, raped and assaulted.
We must rethink why our society has been unable to restore the nation's historically low crime rates that preceded the surge upward starting in the 1970s.
Any assessment cannot escape changes involving capital punishment, which predates the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
The death penalty proved very effective in defeating the murderous gun-crime wave in the 1930s, but its subsequent evolution has been marred by abuses and prejudicial application to the point that a lot of people have lost faith in its ability to deter crime.
Still, the threat of certain death is the most powerful deterrent for any behavior. In normal--i.e., non-suicidal--people, the loss of life is understood to cancel out all possible or potential gain.
Criminals and law-abiders alike understand that cancellation concept, and the high death rate for both murders and fatal accidents often boils down to a simple risk-reward analysis.
A driver in a hurry racing a train to a railroad crossing knows full well that in a collision, the train wins and he dies. Statistical evidence bears out that truth: A motorist is nearly 20 times more likely to die in a crash involving a train than in one with another motor vehicle.
Almost all of the 210 million drivers in America deem the risk too high and yield at the more than 250,000 highway-rail grade crossings in the U.S. Some throw caution to the wind and beat the train.
Every year a tiny percentage of drivers (less than 0.00012 percent) get killed trying.
The threat of the "death penalty" at train-road intersections is thus extremely effective, mostly because of its immediate application.
For centuries, philosophers and psychologists and common sense have all told us with bedrock authority that certainty of punishment is far more effective in prevention than severity of punishment.
But for criminals the difference between fear of certain death and fear of a death penalty is as different as lightning is from a lightning bug.
In 2016, there were 17,250 murders reported, but only 31 death sentences imposed. That risk calculates to less than two-tenths of a percent. Most people weighing the chance of success for any activity, honest or criminal, at more than 99.8 percent will not be deterred on that basis.
And that's just the risk for being convicted of a capital crime; compounding it with a certainty factor of actually being executed pushes the risk calculation much further downward.
Only 20 murderers were executed nationwide in 2016, and the average time between conviction and execution for the group was 18.5 years.
If we model a "time value of deterrence" calculation, assuming the present value of a death-penalty deterrent is greater than a future value, one of the key mitigating risk factors is that with so much time to wait, the penalty may never be received at all.
Indeed, half of all 2,632 death row inmates have been incarcerated for more than three decades--and so far in 2019 there have been just 10 executions, the soonest of which occurred 17 years after sentencing. The average wait: 24 years.
Statistically, it all adds up to a valid conclusion that any person who commits murder today has essentially zero chance of being executed. There is no death-penalty deterrence because there is no real threat, and consequently no fear, of capital punishment ever actually occurring.
Logically, that's the exact opposite of what should be expected. The biggest argument against death penalties has always been the irreversible nature of the punishment in case of an incorrect conviction.
But forensic technology and science and the definitive nature of DNA evidence can establish guilt without any doubt at all, far beyond the reasonable standard that's stood for centuries.
In any capital case where DNA confirms a conviction, there is no longer any risk of a wrongful execution, and no justice-related reason not to carry out the sentence immediately.
Critics of capital punishment can be vocal about their opinions, but in the 29 states where the people have enacted death-penalty statutes, the law should be the law--especially after DNA has removed all doubt.
Because perception is reality, particularly involving celerity of punishment (the speed at which a consequence is imposed), once criminals believed that a DNA match is a fast track to the death penalty, it would undeniably alter their risk assessment of committing capital crimes.
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Dana D. Kelley is a freelance writer from Jonesboro.
Editorial on 07/19/2019