April 20, 2011Dear Sir,For all those people in Bermuda who call for the death penalty to be reintroduced as capital punishment for murder, as a “deterrent” to such violent crime, specifically as a result of the most recent murder of David Clarke and more generally because of the wave of murders over the past two years in Bermuda, note the following: the murder rate for states in the United States that have the death penalty has averaged 5.75 a year per 100,000 population since the year 2000; for states that do not have the death penalty the murder rate has averaged 4.1 a year per 100,000 population in the same ten year period (Source: Death Penalty Information Center – www.deathpenaltyinfo.org). All the states which have executed the highest number of criminals – Texas, Virginia, Oklahoma, Florida and Missouri – have homicide rates about 40 percent higher than the average per capita rate of homicides for all states that do not have the death penalty.Whatever the inclination might be to want to avenge the crime of murder by punishing perpetrators with the death penalty (and roughly two-thirds of Americans are in favour of it), we should be under no illusion that it is a deterrent.People who go out with the intent of murdering someone do not “think twice” about doing it because of the threat of the death penalty. Why would they when they hardly even think once about it? They just go and do it. It's about defiance and power, not rational thought. If anything the existence of the death penalty is linked to a higher, not lower murder rate. But the existence, or indeed absence of the death penalty (or any punishment, for that matter) is not even necessarily a determining factor in violent criminality. Many other phenomena influence the incidence of violent crime in any particular place, including poverty, education levels, social deprivation, demographics and social stability (internal conflict, for example). Understanding and tackling the problems arising from those circumstances might not be the quickest, most expedient or populist response to the reduction of violent crime in Bermuda, but they are the first indispensable steps along what is actually a long and hard road towards effective deterrence.GRAHAM FAIELLALondon, UK