Proponents of the death penalty claim that it provides superior protection to law enforcement officers and prison guards whose job, it is argued, would become more difficult and more hazardous if it were abolished. Since the 1950's the truth of this assumption has been subjected to several tests.

In 1956 Father Donald Campion published a study of 24 American police forces, 18 of which represented death penalty States and six of which represented abolition States. The study covered a 50 year period from 1905 to 1954 and took many factors into account, such as the varying size of the police forces and the populations they served. Father Campion concluded that the data

". . . do not lend empirical support to the claim that the existence of the death penalty in the statutes of a State provides a greater protection to the police than exists in States where the penalty has been abolished".¹⁰

Professor Sellin36,38 did an extensive study of police homicide rates over a 25 year period. He examined the rates for 183 cities in 11 capital punishment States and for 82 cities in six abolition States. The general results of the study demonstrated that between the years 1919 and 1954 the cities in death penalty States had a police homicide rate of 1.3 per 100,000 population, while the cities in abolition States had a police homicide rate of only 1.2 per 100,000 population. Commenting his findings Professor Sellin writes:

"It is obvious from an inspection of the data that it is impossible to conclude that the States which had no death penalty had thereby made the policeman's lot more hazardous. It is also obvious that the same differences observable in

the general homicide rates of the various States were reflected in the rates of police killings".

Sellin concluded further that:

"The claim that if data could be secured they would show that more police are killed in abolition States than in capital punishment States is unfounded. On the whole, the abolition States, as is apparent from the findings of this particular investigation, seem to have fewer police killings but the differences are small. If this, then, is the argument upon which the police are willing to rest their opposition to the abolition of capital punishment, it must be concluded that it lacks any factual basis".

Some years later, Professor Sellin³⁸ using statistics of policemen killed in the U.S.A. by offenders or suspects during 1961-1963 (140 policemen) and using as a base the number of police in the 15 States where the killings occurred according to the 1960 census, found that the annual average risk for the three years was 1.312 per 10,000 police in abolition States and 1.328 in the bordering States. There was, then, no significant difference.

Cardarelli¹¹ analyzing the same data (police killed by criminal action from 1961-1963) came to the conclusion that the data "lend no weight to the argument that the death penalty States afford more protection".

Robin³⁰,³¹ found that in any given year policemen in the U.S.A. are approximately six times more likely to kill than to be killed in the course of their duty; at the same time the probability of either event occurring is very small.

More recently, Professor Sellin⁴¹ did yet another study of police killings in abolitionist and retentionist States based on data published in 1975 in the FBI annual report. His conclusion did not differ from his earlier ones:

"Not only did the police in retentionist States run a greater risk of being feloniously killed, but so did the slayers and suspects involved in these homicides . . .

The data presented in these pages permit only one conclusion, namely that the belief of the police that in order to be safer in their occupation they need laws that threaten potential murderers with death has no factual basis. Indeed, it is evident that the police are more efficient executioners than the public hangman and should inspire more fear than any capital law could do if deterrence were operative".

Studies by Morris,²⁵ Sellin,³⁹ Akman⁴ and Buffum⁸ clearly show that the hazards involved in prison life are not increased by the abolition of the death penalty. Neither does such abolition result in an increase in homicidal or assaultive behaviour in those penal institutions where convicted murderers are detained. Moreover, it is obvious that those who present the greatest danger are insane murderers. Yet, these murderers are by definition excluded from the possible infliction of the death penalty and nobody is calling for their execution as a way of protecting the staff or the patients in the psychiatric institutions in which they are usually held.