For years, social scientists have tried to measure the effects of executions on states and cities that perform them, usually looking for a corresponding decline in homicides, but for years it has been impossible to prove any deterrent effect. In 1975, criminologist William Bowers presented the first of a series of papers that divereged radically from the claims of deterrence. "The failure to find deterrence in study after study," Bowers wrote, "may add up to more than the absence of deterrence."... His seminal study of executions in New York state from 1907 to 1963 found an increase of nearly two homicides in the month following an execution, and almost one and a half in the month after that.... No one has studied the effects of contemporary executions on American cities where they are carried out.



— Jonathan Shainin, The Nation, July 23/30, 2001