Is capital punishment effective?

CAPITAL PUNISHMENT: Does it actually work? Alex Massie finds little reason to suggest it does. "There does not seem to be much evidence showing that states that use capital punishment have lower murder rates than those that don't. On the contrary, in America states that still execute prisoners tend to have higher murder rates than those that do not. (Evidently this does not suggest that abolishing capital punishment lowers murder either. There seems little causation at play here.) Texas has executed nearly five hundred people since 1976 but its murder rate remains much the same as California's where, despite a large population on death row, few executions have actually been carried out in recent years.)"..."I am extremely reluctant to grant the state the power to execute citizens it holds in custody but suspect that while this is certainly a matter of ethics it's also, in part, a question of aesthetics. That is, I cannot pretend to be too upset by the verdicts handed down at Nuremberg even if these too were the product of an unavoidably flawed, though well-intentioned, process. Similarly, had Osama bin Laden been apprehended and put on trial in the United States I doubt I'd have mustered much outrage had he been sentenced to death."