How to Write a Bad Article

Does capital punishment work? I hate the idea of the death penalty - not because I think there’s a load of good evidence that it doesn’t really deter criminals, or because I know the exact number of people put to death who later turned out to be innocent. I haven’t actually really taken a proper look at the evidence at all. Honestly, my real reason for opposing the death penalty is that it feels wrong - I don’t think a civilised country should be killing criminals, regardless of how heinous their crimes were. Depending on your moral intuitions, that statement is likely to either resonate with you a lot or barely at all, but I feel very strongly instinctively that capital punishment is wrong. Obviously, if there was overwhelming evidence that capital punishment had a huge deterrant effect that would save lots and lots of lives, I could (in theory) be swayed. But how good actually is the evidence?

Among the best papers on the deterrence effect of capital punishment is Dezbakhsh and Sheph…