The high cost of the death penalty

The death penalty is much more expensive than life without parole because the Constitution requires a long and complex judicial process for capital cases. This process is needed in order to ensure that innocent men and woman are not executed for crimes they did not commit, and even with these protections the risk of executing an innocent person cannot be completely eliminated.

If the death penalty was replaced with a sentence of Life without the Possibility of Parole where applicable, it would save millions of dollars and also ensures that the public is protected while eliminating the risk of executing the innocent. The money saved could be spent on crime prevention, employing more police officers, drug and alcohol treatment, child abuse prevention programs, mental health services, and services for crime victims and their families.

A report released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, "The Budgetary Repercussions of Capital Convictions," estimated that between 1982-1997 the extra cost of capital trials was a huge $1.6 billion.

These costs are not the result of frivolous appeals but rather the result of constitutionally mandated safeguards that can be summarized as follows:
Juries must be given clear guidelines on sentencing, which result in explicit provisions for what constitutes aggravating and mitigating circumstances. Defendants must have a dual trial--one to establish guilt or innocence and if guilty a second trial to determine whether or not they would get the death penalty. Defendants sentenced to death are granted oversight protection in an automatic appeal to the state supreme court.
 
CONSTITUTIONAL SAFEGUARDS
Since there are few defendants who will plead guilty to a capital charge; virtually every death penalty trial becomes a jury trial with all of the following elements: a more extensive jury selection procedure a fourfold increase in the number of motions filed a longer, dual trial process more investigators and expert testimony more lawyers specializing in death penalty litigation •automatic, mandatory appeals

A study of the costs of the death penalty in California California spends on average $250 million per execution More than 3500 men and woman have a death sentence in the State of California since 1978 and NOT ONE has been released, except those few individuals who were able to prove their innocence.The California death penalty system costs taxpayers more than $114 million a year beyond the cost of simply keeping the convicts locked up for life. (This figure does not take into account additional court costs for post-conviction hearings in state and federal courts, estimated to exceed several million dollars.) With 11 executions spread over 27 years, on a per execution basis, California and federal taxpayers have paid more than $250 million for each execution. It costs approximately $90,000 more a year to house an inmate on death row, than in the general prison population or $57.5 million annually. The Attorney General devotes about 15% of his budget, or $11 million annually to death penalty cases. The California Supreme Court spends $11.8 million on appointed counsel for death row inmates. The Office of the State Public Defender and the Habeas Corpus Resource Center spend a total of $22.3 million on defence for indigent defendants facing death. The federal court system spends approximately $12 million on defending death row inmates in federal court. No figures were given for the amount spent by the offices of County District Attorneys on the prosecution of capital cases, however these expenses are presumed to be in the tens of millions of dollars each year.

This study concludes that the enhanced cost of trying a death penalty case is at least $1.25 million more than trying a comparable murder case resulting in a sentence of life in prison without parole. These savings are entirely at the trial level and would not be reduced by shortening appeals. They do not take into consideration the cost to county taxpayers for the mandatory state supreme court appeals and potential federal appeals.

Sources: Tempest, Rone, "Death Row Often Means a Long Life", Los Angeles Times, March 6, 2005.