Guys, You're Making It Too Easy

The past several pro-death penalty readings I've gone through have included the assertion that racial minorities do not face disproportionate execution because a majority of those executed are white, the assertion that the death penalty must be constitutional because the Supreme Court holds it to be so, and the assertion that the death penalty is just because "justice" and "mercy" are two different words. And now I'm reading one trying to argue that the death penalty deters murder, just from looking at national murder rates and execution rates. In it, the guy explicitly says he's not using sophisticated analysis. No kidding. There's a reason why we have sophisticated analysis, dude.

Honestly, these arguments are just gibberish. It's actually difficult to get through them.

UPDATE: Oh, and later in that same article, the guy claims that the graph of executions per year and the graph of the homicide rate are essentially mirror images. Okay, when executions spiked up from approximately zero to around twenty in 1983 the murder rate happened to fall. But over the next decade-plus the execution rate basically doubled again, and the murder rate went up slightly. Jesus, does this guy understand what a mirror does? Like, I'm sorry, but a lot of the people arguing for the death penalty are just making themselves look like absolute idiots.