Leo’s Brief But Significant Point on Capital Punishment

Once again quoting my Presbyterian pastor (I've stopped calling him my "old PP" as I'm now older than he was!) summed it up as follows.

"Suppose someone murders you in cold blood, with no compunction or remorse. Why should he keep his own life?"

He added "But it is better that ten guilty men rot in jail than that one innocent person hang".

In short, the death penalty is not necessarily immoral in itself. But it can be used incorrectly and once the person is dead, there is no reprieve, not in this life anyway.

There have been quite a few cases over the years where the wrong person has been executed.

I used to sometimes think about a serial killer named Ivan Milat who killed at least seven young people who were backpacking in New South Wales. it's thought the number could be higher.

He eventually died himself in 2019, so he's gone to a higher court, and I don't think I'd like to be in his shoes now.

Ivan Robert Marko Milat (27 December 1944 – 27 October 2019),[1] commonly referred to in media as the Backpacker Murderer, was an Australian serial killer who abducted, assaulted, robbed and murdered two men and five women in New South Wales between 1989 and 1992. His modus operandi was to approach backpackers along the Hume Highway under the guise of providing them transport to areas of southern New South Wales, then take his victims into the Belanglo State Forest where he would incapacitate and murder them. Milat is also suspected of having committed many other similar offences around Australia.

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The cost to the taxpayer to keep Milat fed and alive in prison was estimated by an AI source to be between 5 and 7 million dollars.

To what end? Keep society safe? Keep Milat alive longer?

Total Estimated Cost: Milat was imprisoned for 23 years (from 1996 until his death in 2019). Based on these figures, the total cost to taxpayers for his incarceration is estimated to be at least $5 million to $7 million.

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I think a good argument could be made for the death penalty in his case.

Bob Crowley said:

The cost to the taxpayer to keep Milat fed and alive in prison was estimated by an AI source to be between 5 and 7 million dollars.

To what end? Keep society safe? Keep Milat alive longer?



I think a good argument could be made for the death penalty in his case.

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I put very little trust into AI, so without it explaining how it arrived at those figures, they mean nothing.

Now, Australia doesn't have the death penalty. But if it was anything like the United States... it probably would actually be a lot more expensive to sentence him to death.

It's actually surprisingly expensive to administer the death penalty. You have the extra costs of the administering itself, but the real killer is all of the extra rigamarole required to execute someone; there's a bunch of extra steps (which cost more money) in the trial, then there's all of the appeals that are convoluted and add extra expenses. This ends up making sentencing someone to death actually quite a bit more expensive than to life imprisonment.

Now, these extra expenses might be made up for by the fact that once they're dead, you don't have to handle their expenses... but the thing is, that appeals process I talked about? It's a long process. I looked at the last two people who were executed in the United States( according to this page): Frank Athen Walls and Harold Wayne Nichols, who were executed last month (they had nothing to do with each other, they just were the most recent ones executed). So they were executed in 2025. Walls was convicted and sentenced to death in 1988, and Nichols was convicted and sentenced to death in 1990. The process of going through all of the steps and red tape necessary to get around to killing them took more than 30 years.

Now, maybe Australia would be a whole lot more efficient with their executions than the United States if they still had the death penalty... but I'm not so sure. But I do know that in the United States, what would've happened with Milat if he was sentenced to death is that a whole lot of extra money would be spent on all of the extra requirements for a death penalty case, and then it would've ended up being pointless because (assuming he died at the same age) he would've most likely died before they ever got around to executing him.

While your argument about legal costs has some merit, the USA has a tradition of high legal costs in just about every field.

Americans collectively spend twice as much on civil litigation than they spend on new automobiles – and more than any other industrialised country.

As a fraction of GDP, litigation expenditures in the United States are three times greater than those in the UK; 3.3 tort suits are filed in the United States for each 1,000 inhabitants compared with only 1.2 per 1,000 in England.

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Our Australian system tends to run on British lines, although there are aspects of our legal system I haven't got much time for. One is Workers Compensation - there's a lot of advertisments for lawyers wanting to do Work Cover and accident insurance cases - the system is supposed to help injured workers or those involved in accidents. Instead it seems to be a gravy train for lawyers.

Here's another reference to the cost of keeping Ivan Milat in prison.

Serial killer Ivan Milat is costing more every night to stay at Goulburn prison than a Harbour view room at Sydney's swankiest hotel, the Park Hyatt.

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