On the link between murder rates and violent crime trends: What happens when there isn't one?

Murder rates are up this year in Texas' big cities and across the country, but other (much more common) types of violent crime remain down.

Grits has puzzled over this trend. We usually think of murders as a subset of violent crime - the outliers with worst-case outcomes. Criminologists frequently treat murders as a proxy for other violent crime that may be less well documented. (Rapes or robberies may go unreported, but it's harder to hide dead bodies.) This year, though, those traditional correlations flew out the window. As Jeff Asher and Ben Horvitz wrote in the NY Times this summer:

There have been only four years since 1960 (1993, 2000, 2002 and 2003) when murder increased but overall violent crime decreased nationally, and the increase in murder was small in each of those years. The average absolute difference between the national change in murder and violent crime since 1990 has been just 2.2 percent, so a big increase in murder nationally while violent crime falls is almost unheard-of.

So we're in uncharted territory. If murders go up but other categories of violent crime go down, are we seeing a big-picture trend of more violent crime? Grits has wondered if something else may be happening.

Strangely, police have been solving homicides at ever-lower rates for quite some time now. (Reported the Houston Chronicle, "Homicide detectives [in Houston] solved 89 percent of homicides in 2011. As of May, that number had fallen to 49 percent.") So even if murders were declining before 2020, it wasn't necessarily because the cops did a great job. Moreover, if low clearance rates corresponded to lower murder totals in years past, it's hard to blame the spike this year on police solving fewer crimes.

What else might explain the trend? As hospitals struggle with ICU capacity over COVID, it's possible gunshot victims are losing the competition for resources and dying at higher rates. Earlier this year, a trauma surgeon in Philadelphia identified this tension in a New York Times column, but I haven't seen any follow-up analysis to tell us if that might explain all or part of the rising murder rate. Part of me thinks not. In New York and Chicago, total shooting incidents increased, not just murders. That said, I'm not sure hospitals would admit it if gunshot victims died more often because of ICU shortages.

Regardless, something odd is happening. In a year with so many anomalous occurrences, though, it may be impossible in the near term to figure out just what it is.

Memories of Thanksgivings past: Clemency campaign collaborator ended his life after a terrible crime

Keri Blakinger has an awesome Twitter-thread about spending Thanksgiving in prison. Go read it. She's amazing.

This made me wonder, perhaps for the first time, whether I'd ever published Thanksgiving-themed commentary on Grits. Out of 9K+ posts, I found just two: One was an account of a Thanksgiving meal at a Texas youth prison in Giddings back in '07. The second, in 2011, was a complaint about President Barack Obama's then-chintzy clemency record (it improved dramatically in his second term), criticizing him for pardoning turkeys while quoting a writer, O. Henry, who probably deserved an innocence-based pardon (and certainly deserved one based on his rehabilitation and achievement in later life) for an alleged bank-fraud crime committed in Austin, Texas.

As it happened, an academic named Peter Ruckman, who ran a blog called Pardon Power and was one of a handful of national experts on both presidential and state-level clemency issues, also latched on to the President's O. Henry comments. Grits had been nagging then-Texas Gov. Rick Perry for years to improve his clemency record, so Ruckman and I had become online blog-friends (we never met in person), as he helped me understand how to parse clemency data I was getting in a jumbled mess from the Board of Pardons and Paroles.

Anyway, Prof. Ruckman and I launched a somewhat tongue-in-cheek campaign in 2011 to "Pardon O. Henry," chiding the President for quoting someone denied a pardon to celebrate pardoning turkeys. We created a website to gather petition signatures. I did a little research at the Austin History Center and the O. Henry museum here in town, reading tons of short stories and a half-dozen O. Henry biographies. And Ruckman created a formal posthumous pardon application, vigorously lobbying the Justice Department before it was was eventually denied. We had some fun with it; I learned a lot from the process, both about federal clemency procedures and a beloved American writer. Pete was easy to work with throughout, and a nice guy.

In his second term, Obama dramatically ramped up his use of clemency power, which ultimately was the desired result. But there's a melancholy note I never reported to readers who may remember this long-defunct campaign. Ruckman and I stayed minimally in touch, but I hadn't heard from him for a couple of years when news came this spring that the professor, having reportedly spent much time in a bitter marital breakup, murdered his two sons, 12 and 14, then committed suicide.

I've known this terrible news for several months, but hadn't written about it on the blog. What is there to say? It's about the most awful thing imaginable. However, reconsidering Thanksgivings past, as Keri inspired me to do, made me think of O. Henry, Prof. Ruckman, and his tragic story this afternoon, so I decided to pass it along. Now, Grits fears the president's dumb-ass turkey pardon will annually trigger memories of this macabre coda to what otherwise was a fun and educational little campaign we did together.

Murder down in big Texas cities in 2017, violent crime up in some

As the year closes out, the Brennan Center projected murder and violent crime rates for 2017 based on reporting from the nation's 30 largest cities, including six in Texas. They found that, in aggregate, both had declined from 2016 levels. Looking closer at Texas' data, complicated the story. Here are the changes in murder rates for the Texas cities in the survey:

Houston: -20.5%
San Antonio: -13.5%
Dallas: -1.7%
Austin: -27%
Fort Worth: +0.1%
El Paso: +29.4%

The increase in El Paso's murder rate was from 2.9 to 3.8 per 100,000 residents and represented an increase of 6 murders over the 2016 total.

Murders, though, are rare events occurring in relatively small numbers, which is why it's never ideal to look at one or two years in isolation. Overall, murder rates peaked in 1991 and have declined steadily ever since, with a couple of one or two year upward hiccups, as occurred in 2015 and 2016. But 2017 renewed that downward trend with what Brennan projects will be the second lowest rate for murders overall since the 1990s.

Other violent crime rates, however, rose slightly in Texas' largest cities, despite a slight overall national decline. For the same cities, here are Brennan's projections for year-over-year changes in violent-crime rates from 2016 to 2017:

Houston: +8.8%
San Antonio: +4%
Dallas: +4/8%
Austin: -7.5%
Fort Worth: +5%
El Paso: -7.8%

Now, these are single-digit increases in four of six cities following two decades of decline, so take them with a grain of salt, but it does buck the national trend, which saw violent crime decline 0.6% overall.

When you look at the data city-by-city, however, that average masks wide variation. For example, though declines in Austin and El Paso look quite good, some large cities posted even larger reductions, including: Columbus, Ohio (-12.4%), Indianapolis (-17.9%) and Washington, D.C. (-27.5%). And some quite large cities like New York (-7.4%), Detroit (-9.6%), and Boston (-9.7%) witnessed crime declines equal to or greater than any Texas jurisdiction.

What to make of this jumble? Grits honestly can't say. In most cases, imputing causation to the yearly vicissitudes of crime data (much less any partisan implications), IMO amounts to a fool's errand. I don't believe the new Houston Police Chief, Art Acevedo, can take credit for the decline in murders in his town, for example, nor do I believe he is responsible for the increase in violent crime on his watch. Crime rates measure societal trends which are bigger than the interests or actions of the government, including the police.

In fact, about the only thing you can tell from anyone's interpretation of short-term crime data at this historical moment are the hopes, aspirations, and interests of the interpreter. Crime rates have been dropping for a long time, but nobody knows whether or not we've hit the bottom. Are increases in violent crime rates in those four cities a blip, or the beginning of a longer-term bounce that will sustain over multiple years? No one but a demagogue can do aught but guess, and anybody who does so without offering lots of caveats is most certainly promoting an agenda.

Texas prison gangs (still) responsible for much Juarez violence

Grits hasn't had the bandwidth to focus on border security topics for quite a few years, but I noticed a story from the El Paso Times which reminded me of themes this blog harped on back when it paid more attention to those subjects. A hit man from a Texas prison gang, Barrio Azteca, has been accused of at least 30 murders committed in Juarez, El Paso's sister city across the Rio Grande, which has witnessed more than 500 homicides this year, including the deaths of two police officers.

This brings up an issue related to the US-Mexico border which is almost never discussed, and which, in this era of fact-free partisan sniping over immigration, reflects a reality that the American political dialogue seemingly cannot wrap its head around: The real "spillover violence"  along the border results not from Mexican violence seeping northward, but from American criminals heading south to commit a large proportion of the murders we hear about on the other side of the river. And it's been that way for years.

Barrio Azteca has long hired out its services as contract killers in Juarez, sending gang members south to kill rivals then retreating back across the Rio Grande to safety. At one point, Mexican authorities estimated the Texas-based gang accounted for half of all homicides in Juarez. They have also for years operated massive trafficking operations on the US side.

I'm well past believing chauvinist American law enforcement cares about stopping this. As long as the violence stays on the other side of the border, they seem happy. It's one of the reasons Grits has always had trouble taking the most strident Drug Warrior rhetoric seriously. If you closely study cartel trafficking patterns and their seats of power (Texas law enforcement believes most cartels' "command and control" operations are on the US-side, primarily around Houston), and if you really wanted to disrupt the criminal gangs funneling drugs into the United States, the focus would be on these sorts of US-side activities, not "securing the border" with walls or other faddish solutions which seem to ignore the actual problems.

If tough-on-crime works so well, what's up with murder spikes in Texas cities?

So mass incarceration is working because crime is down, right?

Then what to make of the fact that Austin, San Antonio, Dallas, Houston, and Arlington all experienced significant increases in murders this year, as various media outlets have reported (although official data won't be available for a few months as the final cases of the year are categorized)?

These increases occurred despite Texas incarcerating more people - including more violent criminals - than any other state in the country. They occurred despite vast probation and parole systems monitoring hundreds of thousands of offenders in the community. They happened at a moment when more Texas cops are employed at more Texas law enforcement agencies than at any time in history, and in an era when Texas prosecutors have been granted nearly unfettered discretion. And it occurred even though the largest faction on the Court of Criminal Appeals essentially finds for the government in almost every case.

If big-government tough on crime policies failed to prevent murder spikes in Texas - which can hardly be accused of blue-state leniency when it comes to filling up courtrooms, jails, and prisons - then maybe it's not worth the expense?

That said, as is always the case when dealing with crime stats, one must place these increases in context. In Austin and San Antonio, headline writers emphasized that murder totals were the highest in two decades, which is certainly true. However, Austin had just one fewer murder in 2010, so the number isn't that much of an outlier from recent years. And besides, both Austin's and San Antonio's populations have grown monumentally since the mid-'90s (as has Arlington's, which saw an eyepopping increase in murder numbers this year). So, even after these recent spikes, murder rates remain low by comparison and residents of those cities are safer today, by a longshot, than 20 years ago. That's worth emphasizing more than press reports have done so far.

The press and public focus on murders because a) they're among the most egregious crimes b) they often come with the most compelling stories, and c) the numbers for murders are among the most solid in the crime-data realm because the dead are easy to count. Other crimes are less easy to categorize: Is it a burglary if later investigators come to suspect, but could never prove, that an adult child living with their parents was the real thief? How about if mom and dad decide not to press charges or later claim they were wrong and nothing was stolen? There are no such ambiguities when it comes to murder victims.

OTOH, murders are rare events, their numbers are generally small compared to other crimes, and totals can fluctuate quite a bit year to year for no apparent reason. Even with large, single-year spikes, one learns over time to look for long-term trends, not short-term fluctuations, to understand what's really happening. All of these cities have experienced one-year increases in murders before over the past couple of decades, even though the overall trajectory for each has been downward.

And what's happening may be different in different cities. After all, there's nothing connecting murderers but the outcome of their actions. They're solely responsible for what they do and police realistically have few means to prevent them from doing it. The cops' job is to clean up after them.

In San Antonio, the chief insisted that, “What we’re seeing now is a lot of spontaneous murders,” adding, “It’s really difficult to put a reason on it.” Dallas has also seen a spike, the majority of which the department attributed to home invasions of drug houses. But then, two years ago Dallas was crowing that its murder rates were the lowest since 1930. In Austin, the Statesman reported the murder total was "highest in nearly 20 years," but didn't mention that the per capta rates are now much lower because of the population boom. (Good for AP, which added that tidbit to their version.) Percentage increases look bigger when starting numbers are extremely small.*

Murders are terrible things but to act without understanding rarely achieves the desired results. And overreaction can also have its costs. As Chief McManus in San Antonio warned, attempts at “'arresting the problem away' or 'overpolicing' could just lead to distrust." When rare events like murders do happen, there needs to be a modicum of community trust for police to find and make use of leads, witnesses and other such indispensable assets.

I led off this column by joking about whether the murder spike means mass incarceration "works." The jibe is intended in part at my fellow Texans who've belittled other jurisdictions like Chicago or Los Angeles when they've suffered violent-crime woes. The truth is, crime has very little to do with government enforcement policies and is broadly more responsive to other societal trends and cues.

IMO, cops, prosecutors and prisons didn't have much to do with the bulk of the crime decline of the last two decades, so if they keep doing what they do and crime goes back up, that won't surprise me either. But it should surprise, and concern, anyone who has believed the tough-on-crime hype surrounding the benefits of mass incarceration. Even in red-state Texas, incarcerating more people than anywhere else, we're not immune to national trends and can't pretend being tougher has achieved any better outcomes. It hasn't.

*Pro tip for news consumers: When you see the words "fastest growing" in a headline or news article, substitute "smallest" to understand what the reporter is really describing. Things grow fast when they start small and their increases are relatively large compared to a tiny denominator. H/T to John Pfaff for harping on that observation.

Dallas police shooting: 'This could change everything,' or not

The murders of five police officers in Dallas and the shooting of seven more, plus two civilians, at a Black Lives Matter protest has received massive media attention, with details still emerging, so I'll limit myself to a few initial observations, in no particular order.

* * *

To begin with the obvious, Grits grieves for the officers, their friends and family, as I do for Alton Sterling and Philando Castile and theirs. It's been a disheartening, tragedy-filled week.

When Grits learned that America's latest mass shooting in Dallas targeted police officers, my first thought was "This could change everything." But with just a short time having passed to gain some perspective, now I fear it may change very little, instead helping set some unfortunate and regrettable dynamics into stone.

* * *

One of the reasons Grits waited until now to comment, and then reservedly: Many initial reports were flat-out wrong and I expect others will turn out to be false (much like the Darren Goforth murder in Houston, which stoked similar passions.) Police at first said there were multiple gunmen; there turned out to be one, just as with most mass shootings. The shooter was a military-trained, Afghan War vet armed with a semiautomatic rifle who'd apparently adopted a strain of black nationalist politics in the months before the event.

Three other people were detained who apparently had nothing to do with the episode, though initial reports made it sound like a coordinated group effort. Another protester had his photo posted as a "person of interest" on Twitter by DPD. Then when he turned himself in, police repeatedly lied to him during the interrogation trying to get him to admit to participating in the shooting. This is a legal tactic but also contributes to false confessions. Luckily, in this case the gentleman stood his ground and did not succumb. No one now believes he was involved.

All this to say, from what we now know, the shooter appears to have acted alone. He doesn't seem to have been part of the Black Lives Matter movement except as a sympathizer, and his actions have been roundly condemned by the movement's leadership. The BLM movement is no more responsible for the shooter's actions than the Dallas officers who were shot had anything to do with Alton Sterling's death.

* * *

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick came out with ridiculous comments calling the protesters "hypocrites" for fleeing the scene when the shots rang out, expecting police to protect them. Never mind that police were ORDERING people to leave the scene. What foolishness! BLM isn't saying police shouldn't exist, of course; they're demanding equal protection under the law.

Also, painting protesters as cowards hardly jibes with other reports. One thinks of this image from the chaotic scene, where protesters gathered with a mother around a baby carriage as a human shield to rush the infant to safety.

By contrast, when an angry constituent fired off a gun outside the capitol in 2010, then-Sen. Patrick pushed for metal detectors to be installed at the entrances, creating long lines during the height of session and diminishing the "little d" democratic feel and function at the capitol. So it's not like he's one to run toward the gunshots!

Grits now thinks the Dallas tragedy will mostly solidify and entrench partisans' positions on police accountability matters instead of helping bridge the divide. Patrick's loathsome response and similar outbursts elsewhere tell me the knee-jerk impulse by reactionaries to police accountability protests will be to double down.

Meanwhile there's little evidence the Dallas police shootings will deter the Black Lives Matter movement from protesting and pushing for change. Indeed, from all I've seen, Grits expects the Alton Sterling and Philando Castile shootings to escalate BLM efforts; people are still mad. Plus, there are already long-term media projects in the works which will focus even more attention on the issue, as well as more and more celebrities speaking out, which can drive daily news. Inevitably, shootings by police will continue, some will be problematic, a subset of those will be caught on video, and each of them will add to the drumbeat. Over time, expanded use of body cameras around the country plus the ubiquity of private cell phones mean more video will become available from unjustified shootings, spurring renewed calls for accountability. If that analysis is right, tensions will rise from here before they diminish.

* * * 

Some days, it feels like all of this country's culture-war feuds are conflating around the issue of mass shootings. After the Orlando shootings, Lt. Gov. Patrick had to delete a Tweet which opined that "A man reaps what he sows," claiming it was pre-scheduled and unrelated to the murder of 50 gay club-goers. (He never did explain precisely WHO he meant would reap what they sowed, if not gay people.) But the truth is, Patrick wasn't the only arch-conservative in the strange position of wanting to preserve an anti-gay persona while condemning Muslim terrorism, however callous and contradictory such a stance may seem in the wake of a grievous tragedy.

Similarly, one of the young men killed this week was a concealed carry permit holder who was shot after he told the officer he had a legal firearm and reached for his ID. But it's not the NRA holding rallies across the country in response to his death, but Black Lives Matter! Then a sniper opens up in Dallas, spurring renewed calls for background checks and purchase delays, and now gun-rights advocates find themselves defending the circumstances that empowered a black nationalist, anti-police mass murderer to obtain a sniper rifle. To say politics makes strange bedfellows is an understatement.

Mass shootings tend to merge culture war issues because any time somebody hates a group of people, one way to express it is to take an assault rifle and kill as many of them as possible. And since hatred can run in nearly any direction and motivate people from a variety of ideologies, mass shootings can be motivated by any and all of the social pathologies one can imagine. That's an odd and interesting side effect of this ignominious trend.

* * *

The use of an explosive-laden robot to kill the shooter, who was holed up in a parking garage, appears to have been the first such use of a killer robot by the government on US soil. While this violates Isaac Asimov's three laws of robotics, experts don't seem to think it violates US law or any constitutional principles.

This isn't a lot different from sending an armed drone in to kill the guy. One wonders, had they planned and trained for this or was it decided on the fly? Will this become more common in standoff situations going forward, or was it a one-off? From a normative standpoint, are there problems with police using robots designed for disarming bombs to deliver them? Grits is drawing no conclusion here, but I'm not the only one with questions.

* * *

Grits' pessimism that dynamics will soon change doesn't mean there haven't been important voices trying to lead a divided public in the right direction, including Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, who offered these words of wisdom in the tragedy's aftermath:

“The question is: Can we, as citizens, speak against the actions of a relatively few officers who blemish the reputation of their high-calling and at the same time, support and defend the 99% of officers who do their job professionally, honestly and bravely?” he said. “I think we can and I think we must.”

He's right. But a major lesson from this episode is that a single fool with a penchant for action can undermine thousands of voices raised up calling for change. Messages of unity gel slowly, while messages of division seem to coalesce in an instant.

That said, Grits doesn't share the Marshall Project's pessimism that news from Dallas spells doom for criminal-justice reform writ large. In the long run, conversations which may eventually generate a new vision for policing - one that is safer for both officers and the public - are occurring largely beyond the media maelstrom. In small rooms at the state and local level, activists, police officers, and local politicians are debating specific reforms and finding a path to enact some of them. (BLM's Campaign Zero is tracking state law reforms here.) Progress is slow, we haven't seen much significant change yet, and the process is not for the attention-span challenged. But what's the alternative?

I'm not saying it's impossible to rein in needless police violence; it most certainly is possible, and we must. It just feels like we're on the front end of that debate, not anywhere close to its ultimate resolution.

Beyond (narrow, politicized) explanations for the 2015 homicide spike

Debates over crime-stat interpretation continue, with the publication last week of this NIJ-funded analysis from an academic, Richard Rosenfeld, "Documenting and Explaining the 2015 Homicide Rise," suggesting "Research Directions." For the record, the author only succeeded at the first half of the title. The paper documents the 2015 homicide rise, but scarcely explains it.

(See a good analysis of the document from CityLab. On Twitter, John Pfaff provided this helpful historical national murder data. For those who want more detail, use this tool to analyze crime rates for all types of offenses over time.)

Like the Brennan Center before him, Rosenfeld finds that the homicide rise is real, but confined to a handful of cities (Houston made the list of ten cities with significant homicide increases last year) and within those cities mainly among black folk.

But he then does something Grits found odd, postulating three "plausible explanations" for the 2015 homicide rise. Those were 1) expansion of the heroin market, 2) the growing number of released prisoners thanks to recent reductions in state prison populations, and 3) the Ferguson Effect (of all things). Why just those three? Aren't there more "plausible" explanations?

Not increased gun sales after every mass shooting? Not family violence related to economic distress? Not gang violence related to cartel turf wars or changes in marijuana markets? We're sure it's not that heightened border enforcement makes trafficking in persons and drugs more dangerous and expensive? Or that the real reasons might relate to specific crime patterns in the handful of cities driving the statistical spike? Not that murder rates are at 50 year lows and some cities are regressing to a mean? I'd favor any of those suggestions over Rosenfeld's second and third hypotheses!

As far as correlation-mistaken-for-causation goes, you could just as spuriously easily blame the homicide spike on anger-mongering in the GOP primary and rise of the Donald Trump campaign as postulate a "Ferguson effect"!

Of Rosenfeld's three suggestions, the heroin-market explanation is plausible. But a lot of that conflates with prescription opiod abuse and the delivery vehicles have taken on different vectors from, say, crack cocaine in the '80s. Besides, as Rosenfeld himself notes, the heroin trade began expansion long before this recent homicide spike.

Meanwhile, recent incarceration reductions so far have been quite modest and focused almost entirely on diverting low-level, nonviolent offenders from prison on the front end. So releasing more prisoners seems like an odd thing to blame. As a practical matter, mass incarceration requires mass prisoner releases for reasons which have nothing to do with do-gooder reform agendas.

Consider: Texas releases more than 70,000 inmates per year these days, while in 1990 Texas incarcerated around 40,000 state inmates en toto. TDCJ must release that many every year or the system would become overcrowded and overrun. The Legislature has made clear it doesn't want to pay more to expand a system which already gobbles up nearly $7 billion of the biennial budget.

A system where people go to prison and remain locked up forever is a punitive fantasy, not a realistic expectation of government's capacity nor even, really, an expression of justice. Texas releases five or six thousand of prisoners every month and the crime rate is as low as it's been since the '60s.

Finally, though apparently there's some evidence of police malingering/blue flu as a union tactic in Chicago, Grits has always found Heather MacDonald's Ferguson Effect hypothesis strained and a bit odd. I am surprised to see it portrayed as one of three "plausible" hypotheses, even though Rosenfeld concluded there's no way to confirm it based on currently available evidence. In fact, the point of the document was to suggest research stratagems to determine whether or not the Ferguson-effect explanation is viable.

To me, it's insulting to police officers and their professionalism to suggest that they're all layabouts and laggards who would fail to do their jobs because some protester insulted them or somebody said something mean about cops in the newspaper or comment section. Grits considers the way MacDonald and the police unions have parlayed such a low assessment of police officers' characters into a supposedly pro-police platform to be a quite-amazing parlor trick. It acknowledges and embraces the most cynical assessment of police critics and reframes true, legitimate criticisms as a badge of honor. Well played. Hard to believe that worked. The problem is, as a fundamentally untrue assessment, the frame cannot ultimately hold. Still, it's an impressive public relations ploy.

Not just movie magic: Why the CCA sided with 'Bernie'

Grits pledged to examine all the notable outcomes from Wednesday's Court of Criminal Appeals hand down list, so I suppose I should mention the Bernie Tiede case in which the CCA granted a new punishment phase hearing to the murderer subject of a (quite good) Richard Linklater movie starring Jack Black as the eponymous "Bernie" and Matthew McConnaughey as the DA whose pleadings are now before the court agreeing to reduce the penalty category from a first to a second degree felony. Tiede has been out on bail awaiting the court's decision and reportedly living in Linklater's house. The media blew up at his release in May. (See exemplar editorial pieces pro and con.)

In a surprising (to me) development, it appears the court may have used the state's new "junk science writ" to reach its conclusion, though the per curiam order did not go into detail. It merely said that the:

Applicant alleges there is newly available relevant scientific evidence that contradicts the scientific evidence relied upon by the state at trial, and that false evidence was presented at trial thus undermining confidence in the verdict at sentencing.

The trial court, after conducting a live hearing and based upon an extensive record, has recommended that applicant be granted relief in the form of a new punishment hearing. The State agrees that Applicant is entitled to relief.

The substantive debate played out in the dissenting opinion by Judge Sharon Keller and a concurrence by Judge Elsa Alcala, who ironically applied the same deferential standard to local prosecutors and the trial court that one normally sees from Keller and Co. when the state wants to hang-em-high. To be fair, Keller makes some excellent points in her dissent, calling on the court to exercise independent discretion instead of mindlessly parroting the prosecution's party line without justification. I've thought the same thing myself many times reading rulings in which she was in the majority, siding with the State for no other reason (at least publicly stated) than that she had the votes to do so.

Basically, here the State agrees it presented "false evidence" when an expert important to the prosecution's punishment-phase case told the jury that Tiede had an unremarkable mental health history. It turned out he was a victim of child abuse, state and defense experts agree. Since the prosecutor agrees false evidence was presented and the local trial court's findings support the claim, from my perspective the only news here is that the court did not hypocritically up-end its defer-to-the-state-no-matter-what approach when it benefited a defendant. A cynic might think that dynamic only plays one way.

Judge Alcala is turning out to be an important thought leader on the court and an intellectual counter-weight to Judges Keller and Keasler on the pro-government side. Perhaps her presence will make Judge Cochran's lamentable departure easier to bear.

In which states are men most likely to murder women? (TX ranked 16th)

In the wake of a national frenzy over the video of an NFL star punching his wife, we learn that Texas ranked 16th in the number of females murdered by men in single victim/single offender homicides, according to a new report by the Violence Policy Center titled, "When Men Murder Women" (pdf, see Appendix 1, pp 9-10). Alaska topped the chart at 2.57 such murders per 100,000 women, followed by South Carolina (2.06), Oklahoma (2.03), Louisiana (1.92), and Mississippi (1.89). The lowest rate was in New Hampshire at .30 per 100,000 women.

Based just on the raw numbers in this report, Texas had the second highest total number of such killings after California, which makes sense since they're the two most populous states. In 2012, California had 18.4% more women murdered by a single male offender than Texas - 212 compared to 179. But because the Golden State's population is so much greater, California's per-capita rate is lower - 1.11 per 100,000 women in 2012 compared to 1.37 in Texas (i.e., Texas' per-capita rate is 23% higher than California's, which was tied for 27th).

Sixteenth isn't great - New Jersey is ranked 33rd, for example, and the per-capita rate there is only .90 per 100K. But this is one list where I'm relieved to find my home state isn't leading the pack.

Via the Texas Legislative Reference Library.

New DOJ homicide stats: Murders at 50-year low; blacks 6x more likely to be victims; mass shootings rare

Check out these highlights and lowlights from the new DOJ Bureau of Justice Statistics report, Homicides in the U.S. Known to Law Enforcement, 2011:

• The U.S. homicide rate declined by nearly half (49%), from 9.3 homicides per 100,000 U.S. residents in 1992 to 4.7 in 2011, falling to the lowest level since 1963. From 2002 to 2011, the average homicide rate for males was 3.6 times higher than the rate for females. The average homicide rate for blacks was 6.3 times higher than the rate for whites.
• From 2002 to 2011, young adults ages 18 to 24 had the highest homicide rate of any age group and experienced the greatest rate decline (down 22%) over the 10-year period, from 15.2 per 100,000 in 2002 to 11.9 in 2011.
• The rate of homicides involving a firearm decreased by 49% from 1992 to 2011, while the percentage of homicide victims killed by a firearm (67%) remained stable.
• Large cities of 100,000 or more residents experienced the largest decline (23%) in homicide rates from 2002 to 2011, compared to communities with less than 100,000 residents.
• From 2002 to 2011, the majority (95%) of homicide incidents involved a single victim. In 2011, 66% of homicides with a single victim involved a firearm, compared to 79% of homicide incidents with multiple victims.

Not only was the 4.7 per 100K homicide rate in 2011 the lowest since 1963, it was "54% below its peak of 10.2 per 100,000 persons in 1980." Further, despite all the publicity surrounding high-profile mass shootings, "Since 2002, the percentage of homicide incidents involving two or more victims has remained relatively stable." According to the report, "In 2011, about 110 homicide incidents involved three victims, or less than 1% of all homicides that year. Homicide incidents involving four or more victims were even less frequent. In 2011, of an estimated 13,750 reported homicide incidents, about 25 involved four or more victims."

SCOTUS ruling leaves 17 year old capital murderers in sentencing limbo

The US Supreme Court today ruled that life without parole for juveniles is unconstitutional when the sentence is mandatory. (See initial coverage from SCOTUSBlog and from Sentencing Law & Policy here, here, here, and here.) At first blush, Grits thought the case might not affect Texas since we abolished life without parole (LWOP) for juveniles in 2009. But at the Texas District and County Attorneys User Forum, Shannon Edmonds raised a valid point: "since current Texas law eliminates death for 17-year-olds, leaving LWOP as the only option, isn't it 'mandatory' under current law?"

The issue arises because the age of majority in Texas is 17, whereas the feds consider youth juveniles until they're 18. Edmonds suggested that as a result of today's ruling, "the Legislature will have to pass a life-with-parole carve-out for 17yo killers, as they previously did for capital murderers under 17yo back in 2009." A prosecutor from Hidalgo County concurred with Edmonds, but wondered what happens between now and then:

It appears that we now have a capital murder offense for which both punishments under the Penal Code, a death sentence and LWOP, have now been held unconstitutional when the defendant was 17 or younger at the time of offense commission. I don't think that it is possible to impose some other sentence for capital murder that is not authorized under the Penal Code. So my question becomes what are our options until the Legislature meets in January? Are we left with proceeding on a murder charge and trying to obtain a lengthy sentence as our only option at this point?

Good question. I'm not a lawyer, but offhand it strikes me as correct that there are presently no constitutional sentences on the books in Texas for a 17-year old convicted of capital murder. They're not eligible for the juvenile max sentence (which makes them parole eligible after 40 years), and both the death penalty and life without parole have been taken off the table by the US Supreme Court. That leaves the only apparent option seeking a "life" sentence for "regular" murder, which in Texas makes one eligible for parole after 30 years. For the time being, at least until the Legislature meets again, that must suffice as justice.

There's one other possible impact of today's ruling in Texas: After the state made life without parole the only alternative to the death penalty for capital murderers in 2005, a handful of juveniles were given that sentence after being tried as adults, a situation that ended when the Lege in 2009 made juvenile capital murderers parole eligible after 40 years. So the question arises, will those juveniles be eligible for re-sentencing, or will this be treated as a procedural change that is not retroactive? States around the country will face the same question in the coming weeks and months, some on a much larger scale than Texas, which has just a few such cases.

MORE (6/26): An editorial in the Austin Statesman gave these additional details about Texas juveniles sentenced to LWOP between 2005 and 2009:

Thus, 27 juveniles who were convicted of capital murder as adults between 2005, when the U.S. Supreme Court banned the death penalty for juveniles, and the passage of the new 2009 law are sitting in prison without any chance for parole. Monday's ruling should lead to new punishment hearings for these individuals. ...

In Texas, 10 inmates were younger than 16 at the time they committed their crimes.

AND MORE: The Texas Tribune speculates whether the Governor may commute sentences for the 27 Texas inmates sentenced to LWOP as juveniles:

After the Supreme Court in 2005 decided that the death penalty for juveniles was unconstitutional, Gov. Rick Perrycommuted the sentences for 28 17-year-olds on death row. All 28 were given life sentences with the possibility of parole in 40 years.

After Monday's ruling, the state is still determining what action to take. “The Governor’s Office is working with the Attorney General, the Board of Pardons and Paroles, prosecutors and the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to determine how many individuals may be affected by this ruling and what the appropriate steps will be for Texas going forward,” Josh Havens, a spokesman for the governor’s office, said in a statement.

Jason Clark of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said his office began preparing soon after the court’s announcement, and identified the 27 convicts in anticipation of any requests from the attorney general or governor’s offices.

On texting, driving, fact checking, murder rates, borderline competency and global security

A few, disparate tidbits:

Houston 2011 murder rate nearly as low as Mexico City
The murder rate in Houston is at its lowest since 1965,  (and nearly the lowest since data began to be recorded), with 198 murders last year compared to a high of 701 in 1981, reported KUHF radio. Still, the murder rate of 9.4 per 100,000 is substantially higher than the statewide murder rate of 5.0 in 2010, according to DPS data (pdf). To put that number into perspective, Mexico City's murder rate is 8.3 per 100,000, so in that light 9.4 perhaps isn't exactly being all you can be. Still, Less Murders = Good. MORE: From Kuff.

After death, inquiry finds most youth at Granbury juvie detention in isolation for unjustified reasons
Now that the new Texas Juvenile Justice Department is up and running, there's no time to lose in exercising its oversight function. Reports the Weatherford Democrat, "A state investigation of the Granbury Regional Juvenile Justice Center following the death of a 14-year-old Cleburne boy in October has raised questions about the role of the facility’s non-compliance with detention facility standards in the boy’s death." Said the paper, a TJJD "report released last week found several violations related to keeping the juveniles in isolation nearly all day on Oct. 10 outside of the physical presence of a juvenile supervision officer. The 11 residents of 'Alpha Pod' were kept locked in their rooms most of the day, not allowed to participate in educational and other activities as required and left without the supervision level required during daytime program hours, the TJJD investigation found." Further, "Investigators found that only one of the 11 residents of 'Alpha Pod' was 'confined for a reason justified by standards, namely the resident’s disciplinary seclusion status.'" In other words, 10 of the 11 kids in isolation at the time of the boys death shouldn't have even been there.

Borderline competency: Good question, no easy answers
Asks a prosecutor on the DA Association user forum, "What do you do with those VERY low functioning defendants who are already receiving services from MHMR and whose competency is borderline?... Seems they are getting more plentiful." While one wag replied, "Send them off to law school?," others including John Bradley noted there are no easy answers, particularly in the wake of budget cuts to mental health services in the most recent legislative session.

Constable resigns in lieu of prosecution
The DA in Lubbock won't pursue criminal charges against a local constable in exchange for his resignation and lifetime ban from serving as a peace officer.

H-Town burglar alarm fees don't pay for city services
In Houston, according to HPD's website, "The cost of responding to alarm calls for service in FY2007 was approximately $11.8 million dollars and exceeded the City's total annual revenues in that fiscal year ($7.99 million dollars) derived from permit fees and penalties associated with burglar, panic, holdup and similar alarm systems."

Balko: Anger vs. Lykos stems from 'efforts to change the culture'
Radley Balko suggests that in the Harris County District Attorney primary, "intra-party anger seems to stem mostly from [Pat Lykos'] efforts to change the culture in the Harris County DA’s office." Exactly. There's an odd nostalgia among her most ardent critics which Grits suspects can never be satisfied. It's a new century, and whatever happens in April or November, Johnny Holmes won't be walking through the door anytime soon.

Problem with texting while driving is the driving, not the texting
Fascinating. Fewer teens are driving and studies say cars are no longer the status symbol of freedom that they once were among young Americans, particularly in cities. Texting while driving is bad, argues Lisa Hymas at Grist, but more importantly, "we need to work urgently on making driving less necessary in the first place." Great line from Clive Thompson at Wired: "When we worry about driving and texting, we assume that the most important thing the person is doing is piloting the car. But what if the most important thing they're doing is texting? How do we free them up so they can text without needing to worry about driving?" How's that for reframing the question? I'm still rather amazed that Gov. Perry vetoed the texting while driving ban passed in Texas this year.

Iran, Pakistan, Mexico, None-Of-The-Above: Which is biggest threat to world stability?
This is nuts to me: From any rational American perspective - certainly for those of us living in border states - the biggest threat to stability in 2012 isn't Iran, surely it's from drug violence and instability in Mexico and Latin America, arguably followed by anti-western sentiment in already-nuclear Pakistan, where our troops are entrenched across the border for the foreseeable future. In Grits' book, I'd put high food prices (at least) third on the list. Why downplay instability in a nation that already has nukes, much less massive corruption and bloodshed on the US southern border, to proclaim Iran the ultimate threat? That's the sort of demagoguery that makes people vote for Ron Paul. Which is more dangerous for world security: A nuclear Iran or a starving Africa?

Fact check this
Greg Marx at the Columbia Journalism Review has an essay articulating numerous criticisms which have been gelling in Grits' own mind in recent months about so-called "fact checking" services like Politifact and the limits of the framework under which they operate, particularly regarding legal issues. I finished his piece and thought, "Damn, I wish I'd written that," which of course is the highest compliment one writer can pay to another. My biggest frustration with Politifact, et. al.: Grits despises the notion that fact checking should be somehow considered specialty work among journalists, implying that most journalists are mere mouthpieces for special interests who don't provide a significant truth filter between their sources and the public. That may be accurate as a practical, workaday matter, but it's not a model to aspire to.

LWOP created boomlet in TX capital cases along with death penalty decline

Several disparate, recent stories combine to paint an unlikely picture of capital murder sentencing in Texas. Since the state introduced the option of a life-without-parole (LWOP) sentence for capital murder in 2005 - simultaneously eliminating the possibility of parole for capital crimes - the number of capital cases filed has escalated, reports the Odessa American, while the number of new death sentences has plummeted (from 48 in Texas in 1999 to 8 this year). Meanwhile, of course, murder rates have continued to decline over the same period.

What does it all mean? For starters, that the increase in capital cases does not result from more heinous murders (there are actually fewer) but from changing prosecutorial charging decisions. Prosecutors are pursuing capital cases more often where they previously would have sought plain old murder charges because it provides a bigger stick to threaten defendants with (i.e., death) during the plea bargaining process. Even though more capital cases are getting charged, however, most prosecutors who're driven by pragmatic as opposed to political motives prefer not to pursue the death penalty, which can be so costly that smaller counties sometimes have had to raise taxes or issue bonds to pay for a single case. So we get this boomlet of "capital" cases, but nearly all of them result in LWOP instead of death sentences.

It's also pretty clear that - with murder rates declining in Texas while both the frequency of executions and new death sentences also declined - it'd be impossible to attribute the murder reduction to any supposed deterrence effect from capital punishment. If there's any correlation at all (notice I didn't say causation), the murder rate declined more or less in tandem with the declining use of the death penalty in Texas, and was much higher back in the '90s when it was exercised more frequently.

Other than that, it's hard to know what conclusions to draw from such counter-intuitive data except that prosecutorial discretion matters a lot more in what sentences defendants end up with than is frequently considered by those writing the laws. I'm not sure the LWOP bill would have passed if the Lege had known the result would be a much larger number of capital murder charges filed. Perhaps, but it certainly wasn't part of the terms of debate at the time.

RELATED: Rise of LWOP sentences contributes to Californication of Texas justice

On the link (or lack thereof) between solving murders and reducing their number

An article in the Houston Chronicle today laments the declining clearance rate for homicides, which in many jurisdictions are below 50%. Reports Yang Wang (no really, that's the reporter's name):

Some Houston-area communities are among 120 cities and counties across the state where 63 percent of murders or fewer are solved — falling short of the national average — according to a Houston Chronicle analysis of the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting database. The findings are based on cases reported by local agencies from 2004 through 2009.

For some communities, the problem is sheer volume: Too many murders, too many culprits and too many places to hide in a massive metropolis of nearly 6 million people.

For others, a lack of manpower, forensic crime labs and simple clues reduce the odds of finding a killer. The city of Galveston, for example, had just 32 murders between 2004 and 2009, but solved only 17.

San Antonio's Bexar County Sheriff's Office cleared just 39 percent of its homicides, Waco 56 percent and Odessa 52 percent, based on numbers the police agencies provided to the FBI.

But while murder clearance rates in some cities lag behind the national average, nearly 70 percent of the slayings in Houston get solved. In fact Houston, considering its size, is on par or better than most cities of its size.

But how much is enough? A 70 percent success rate still leaves 30 percent without answers. And the numbers provide little comfort to the families of victims across the region where 850 deaths have yet to result in arrests.

Even with its greater ability to solve these violent crimes, the Houston Police Department still had 550 unsolved murders; Harris County had about 170. At the same time, both agencies reported more than 1,609 homicides with suspects identified.

It's a strange conundrum that homicide clearance rates are declining nationally at a time when the numbers of murders are also going down. That means that the efforts of police and prisons - catching killers and taking them off the street - likely isn't the reason for the declining number of murders, though that's the traditional cause-and-effect paradigm that's portrayed in the media. Instead the reasons for declining murder rates are more demographic, economic and cultural than they are a result of improved police work.

But what is the reason for declining clearance rates? My theory is that society has come to use police too frequently to address social problems like alcoholism, drug abuse, child support, truancy, etc., or for revenue enhancement in the case of writing traffic tickets, instead of focusing on traditional crimes with actual victims. (Clearance rates for burglary are much, much lower even than for murder.)

It's simple, really: If all your cops are writing tickets, combing the streets for DWIs, busting penny ante drug users, chasing down truants, compiling photographic catalogs of graffiti, etc., those same cops aren't spending their time helping solve homicides. And Texas voters' anti-taxation sentiments mean local governments couldn't hire enough police to perform all these tasks, even if they wanted to do so. So the stuff that generates revenue (like writing traffic tickets) or that lends itself to political demagoguery (like graffiti and DWI enforcement ) gets prioritized over catching killers or burglars.

What do readers think explains declining homicide clearance rates? And if homicides are declining at the same time police are solving a lesser percentage of murders, what do you think accounts for the overall decline in recent years of homicides nationwide?

Homicide clearance rates on the decline

Scripps Howard News Service last week ran a series on the national decline in clearance rates (the percentage of cases solved) for homicides. The main story opens:

Every year in America, 6,000 killers get away with murder.

The percentage of homicides that go unsolved in the United States has risen alarmingly even as the homicide rate has fallen to levels last seen in the 1960s.

Despite dramatic improvements in DNA analysis and forensic science, police fail to make an arrest in more than one-third of all homicides. National clearance rates for murder and manslaughter have fallen from about 90 percent in the 1960s to below 65 percent in recent years.

In Texas, the statewide clearance rate is 71%. S-H had several additional stories accompanying the feature that may interest Grits readers:

• Many 'best practices' known to improve homicide investigations
• A look at what kind of homicides get solved
• One in nine Americans know the victim of an unsolved homicide

This trend strikes me as particularly odd because we've witnessed a decline in homicide rates over the last 20 years and expansive growth of the number of law enforcement agencies and personnel, but over the same period the proportion of murders solved has also gone down. Scripps Howard quotes law enforcement officials saying the reason is the type of murders: Crimes of passion tend to get sorted out, but "Only about two-thirds of all robbery-based homicides are solved. About 63 percent of killings committed during an illegal drug transaction are solved, as are only 57 percent of killings over gang-related disputes."

IMO that doesn't fully explain the data. Instead, I think we're witnessing the extraordinarily high opportunity costs for pursuing the war on drugs and expanding law enforcement's purview to address a wide array of social problems instead of focusing on traditional crime fighting. Cops issuing tickets for truancy, compiling photo albums of graffiti, making arrests for pot smoking, or trolling the highways to generate asset forfeiture income aren't focusing their time on more serious offenses. However solving murders doesn't generate revenue, while writing tickets for petty offenses helps fill up local coffers, creating perverse priorities that (at least partially) explain the declining clearance numbers.

Texas jurors sent only 8 murderers to death row in 2009

An Austin Statesman report about Travis County DA Rosemary Lehmberg's decision to seek the death penalty in the sexual assault and murder of an LBJ High School student included this analysis of the Travis DA's track record on capital cases over the last ten years:

Prosecutors in Travis County have announced their intent to seek the death penalty 15 times in the past decade. Two of those defendants pleaded guilty in exchange for life sentences, and juries gave life prison terms to six others. Six defendants received the death penalty. One case is pending, that of Milton Dwayne Gobert, accused of killing a North Austin woman and stabbing her 5-year-old son in 2003. Gobert is scheduled for trial in January.

One of those sentenced to death — Robert Springsteen IV — saw his conviction overturned on appeal and the case against him dismissed in October. Along with Springsteen, Michael Scott had been convicted of capital murder in the killing of one of four teenage girls found dead in 1991 in a North Austin yogurt shop. In dismissing the case, Lehmberg said that prosecutors could not prove the case against Springsteen and Scott, given recently discovered DNA evidence.

So in nearly 2/3 of cases in which Travis prosecutors sought the death penalty, they did not succeed in securing it. Perhaps relatedly, according to a press release this week from the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty:

New death sentences in Texas remained at historic low levels in 2009, according to the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty's (TCADP) newly-released report, Texas Death Penalty Developments in 2009: The Year in Review. TCADP, an Austin-based statewide, grassroots organization, releases its annual report each December in conjunction with the anniversary of the resumption of executions in Texas in 1982.

As of December 4, Texas juries had condemned eight new individuals to death in 2009. If this number remains unchanged, it will represent the lowest number of new death sentences since the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Texas' revised death penalty statute in 1976. The report notes, however, that this year Texas once again accounted for half of all executions that took place in the United States. The state has executed a total of 447 people since 1982, out of 1,186 executions nationwide since 1977. Two hundred eight of these executions have occurred during the administration of Texas Governor Rick Perry.

Among those executed, six inmates were convicted in Harris County, which alone accounts for more executions (112) than any state in the country besides Texas. Yet for the second consecutive year, Harris County did not condemn any new defendants to death (juries returned two inmates to death row). While Harris County still accounts for a third of all Texas inmates awaiting execution (106 of 332), it has sentenced just seven new individuals to death in the last four years. In the 1990s, it often sent 15 people a year to death row.

RELATED: Death penalty deterrent evanescent, symbolic.

UPDATE (Dec. 9): Make it nine. A Huntsville jury gave the death penalty yesterday to the TDCJ inmate who killed prison guard Susan Canfield in a 2007 escape attempt.

Why do Americans murder?

A New Yorker book review by Jill Lepore explores the question "Why is American history so murderous?" Fascinating stuff. Here's her comparison (based on information in several books reviewed together) of US homicide rates with European nations:

In Europe, homicide rates, conventionally represented as the number of murder victims per hundred thousand people in the population per year, have been falling for centuries. Spierenburg attributes this long decline to what the German sociologist Norbert Elias called the “civilizing process” (shorthand for a whole class of behaviors requiring physical restraint and self-control, right down to using a fork instead of eating with your hands or stabbing at your food with a knife), and to the growing power of the centralizing state to disarm civilians, control violence, enforce law and order, and, broadly, to hold a monopoly on the use of force. (Anthropologists sometimes talk about a related process, the replacement of a culture of honor with a culture of dignity.) In feuding medieval Europe, the murder rate hovered around thirty-five. Duels replaced feuds. Duels are more mannered; they also have a lower body count. By 1500, the murder rate in Western Europe had fallen to about twenty. Courts had replaced duels. By 1700, the murder rate had dropped to five. Today, that rate is generally well below two, where it has held steady, with minor fluctuations, for the past century.

In the United States, the picture could hardly be more different. The American homicide rate has been higher than Europe’s from the start, and higher at just about every stage since. It has also fluctuated, sometimes wildly. During the Colonial period, the homicide rate fell, but in the nineteenth century, while Europe’s kept sinking, the U.S. rate went up and up. In the twentieth century, the rate in the United States dropped to about five during the years following the Second World War, but then rose, reaching about eleven in 1991. It has since fallen once again, to just above five, a rate that is, nevertheless, twice that of any other affluent democracy.

That puts a bit of a different spin on the debate of whether and how much the death penalty acts as a deterrent, doesn't it, when nations that have abolished capital punishment deter murder with greater success?

Lepore also provides an able overview of the antebellum use of capital punishment and three-strikes laws in the United States, including history I hadn't seen before:

Capital punishment has been on the books in Connecticut since 1642. Three strikes has been tried before, too. In Colonial America, many crimes, including murder, were punishable by death and, for lesser crimes, Connecticut, like many colonies, mandated the death penalty for third-time offenders. That began to change on September 7, 1768, when a burglar named Isaac Frasier was hanged in Fairfield. Frasier had shown early evidence of a “thievish Disposition.” “Men go from one degree of wickedness to another,” the town’s minister said in a sermon at the gallows titled “Excessive Wickedness, the Way to an untimely Death.” Convicted of burglary in New Haven, Frasier was whipped and branded and had his ears cropped. Caught again in Fairfield in 1766, he received the same punishment “and was solemnly warned . . . that death would be his punishment on a third Conviction.” When Frasier robbed another house, he was sentenced to death. “The Government of Connecticut have always been remarkably tender of putting persons to Death,” one observer noted. But when Frasier applied to the legislature for clemency, he was denied. Said the pastor at the gallows, “Justice requires that you should suffer.”

An outcry followed. Two weeks after Frasier’s death, a Hartford newspaper published an essay called “An Answer to a very important Question, viz. Whether any community has a right to punish any species of theft with death?” The writer’s answer—an emphatic no—borrowed extensively from Cesare Beccaria’s treatise “On Crimes and Punishments,” published in 1764. Beccaria, an Italian nobleman, argued against capital punishment—which was, at the time, widespread in Europe, too—on two grounds: first, in a republic men do not forfeit their lives to the government; and, second, capital punishment does not deter crime. Beccaria argued (and Kleiman has merely revisited that argument) that punishments, to be effective, must be swift and certain but not necessarily severe. Punishments, he insisted, should be proportionate to crimes, whose dangerousness could be measured, in “degrees,” by their injury to society. For the crime of murder, Beccaria considered life in prison to be both more just and a more effective deterrent than execution.

The first American edition of Beccaria’s treatise was published in 1777, and it reached a wide audience in Connecticut beginning in 1786, when it was serialized in a New Haven newspaper. “If we glance at the pages of history, we will find that laws, which surely are, or ought to be, compacts of free men, have been, for the most part, a mere tool for the passions of some,” Beccaria wrote. This argument held particular appeal for a people who had just finished waging a war against the passions of King George; adopting Beccaria’s recommendations came to seem, in a fundamental sense, American, as if the United States had a special role to play, as a republic, in the abolition of capital punishment. In 1784, the Yale senior class debated whether the death penalty was “too severe & rigorous in the United States for the present Stage of Society.”

In the seventeen-nineties, five states abolished the death penalty for all crimes except murder. By the eighteen-twenties, all Northern states reserved capital punishment for first-degree murder. When incarceration replaced all corporal and most capital punishment, Americans built prisons, and sentenced criminals to jail time. In 1846, Michigan became the first state to abolish the death penalty.

Most of the arguments offered for WHY the United States has higher murder rates seem a little half-baked (a prevalent European theory holds that Americans gained political freedom before we were civilized), but the higher rates are a long-term reality and it's an interesting question why Americans kill each other more often? Go read the whole piece for a taste of the variety of theories offered by different authors to explain the question. Certainly IMO there's a cultural element to it - a distinctly American preference for "honor" over "dignity," as Lepore put it. She also suggests that the wider availability of guns in America contributes. But none of these theories either a) are verifiable or b) completely explain the long-term data, even if true.

Why do you think Americans kill each other more often than citizens of other affluent democracies?