Can the Death Penalty Deter a Martyr?
Death penalty supporters sometimes point to deterrence as a basis for government imposition of the ultimate penalty. Whether the death penalty in fact deters crime is the subject of serious debate. Some recent studies claim to find a deterrent effect, while other scholars have pointed to flaws in the methodology of these studies that, the critics say, make the researchers’ conclusions unreliable. So, does the death penalty have a greater deterrent effect than the prospect of life imprisonment? Whatever the right answer to that question may be, the question of deterrence has a very different complexion when applied to terrorists whose very aim is to die while carrying out an attack on civilians. People who hope to succeed by dying are highly unlikely to worry about the possibility of being killed if they are captured. This logic applies most directly to Mohamed al-Qahtani, the alleged “twentieth hijacker,” as he would have died in the 9/11 attacks if he had successfully entered the Unit
