A "thermic law" postulating a relationship between violent crime and hot weather or southern climates is one of the oldest propositions in criminology. On the question of homicide and seasonality, modern research produces contradictory findings-some studies support a seasonal pattern of homicide but others reject such a pattern. A review of studies on the seasonality of homicide and an analysis of Uniform Crime Reports data and data on homicide in Baltimore from 1974 to I984 are undertaken in order to resolve the issue. The contradictory results are not explained by differences in definitions nor by differences in data or methodology; nor are they explained on the bases of regional differences or an urban bias present in most studies. The nature of the question asked, however, is critical to the results obtained. The conclusion reached is that there is no season to homicide. The months of December, July, and August are signijicantly more likely to be among the months in which homicide is high for any given year, but the number of homicides during those months may not be significantly higher than in other months.

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As of January 1, 1987, 29 states have life-without-parole statutes. These laws are divided into capital offender statutes that most commonly apply the sanction for aggravated homicide, and career criminal statutes that apply the sanction to repeat offenders under specified conditions. Although both types are life-without-parole statutes, they are directed at two very different offender populations and probably arise from divergent social and political conditions. Further, the capacity of the executive to release through commutation makes the life-without-parole statutes less substantial than is commonly believed. Some of the problems that increased use of this sanction may create are discussed, and a research agenda to prepare for these problems before they arrive is suggested.

A matching process identified 293 pairs of counties in the United States that share 45 percent or more of their borders across a state line. Data from the 1988 County and City Data Book were then used to examine social, demographic, and economic differences within these matched pairs, with the difference in the violent crime rate in each pair employed as the dependent variable. Three variables reflecting the existence and use of capital punishment in the two states represented in each matched pair-the existence of a provision for capital punishment, the number of people executed since 1976, and the number of people currently held on death row-were then entered in the analysis to examine the effects of capital punishment. The capital punishment variables did not account for any significant portion of the differences in the violent crime rates, and, contrary to deterrence theory, what effects these variables did have were positive. These findings support the large number of studies at state and national levels that have found no deterrent effect of capital punishment.