The Death Penalty Works?

Imagine if this ever received real exposure in public:

• Anti-death penalty forces have gained momentum in the past few years, with a moratorium in Illinois, court disputes over lethal injection in more than a half-dozen states and progress toward outright abolishment in New Jersey.
  
  The steady drumbeat of DNA exonerations - pointing out flaws in the justice system - has weighed against capital punishment. The moral opposition is loud, too, echoed in Europe and the rest of the industrialized world, where all but a few countries banned executions years ago.
  
  What gets little notice, however, is a series of academic studies over the last half-dozen years that claim to settle a once hotly debated argument - whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent to murder. The analyses say yes. They count between three and 18 lives that would be saved by the execution of each convicted killer.

Now we are aware that there are lies, damn lies and statistics. And it amuses us to no end that people outside of the liberal media and academia are finally taking a closer look at statistics and finding that the results trumpeted for so long are generally complete BS (see the global warming debate).

We really have no idea if the results of this study truly indicate that the death penalty deters crime - what we do know is that in the case of every single executed individual, not one has returned from the grave to commit another murder.