I've found the debate over death penalty deterrence interesting, but difficult to understand given my level of understanding in the field of statistics. However, the Supreme Court appears to have given us a unique opportunity to test the dueling hypotheses. Do you or the authors you link to on the site know whether the de facto moratorium in the wake of the Baze grant has led to a statistically significant spike in murders?

Given the time lag in official statistics, I would not expect such a study for a couple of years. For previous work on single-state moratoriums, see the two Cloninger and Marchesini articles and the Sorensen et al. article in our deterrence abstract list.