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Testimony In Support Of Connecticut Senate Bill 1035 And House Bill 6425, Abolishing The Death Penalty (2011), John J. Donohue

John Donohue

In 1975, Isaac Ehrlich launched the modern econometric evaluation of the impact of the death penalty on the prevalence of murder with a controversial paper that concluded that each execution would lead to eight fewer homicides (Ehrlich 1975). A year later, the Supreme Court cited Ehrlich’s work in issuing an opinion ending the execution moratorium that had started with the 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia. Today it is widely recognized that Ehrlich's national time-series methodology is too unreliable to be published in any economics journal.

Over the last few years, a number of highly technical papers have purported to …