Considering The Death Penalty: Your Tax Dollars At Work
5/01/2014
- on April 29, 2014, the state of Oklahoma attempted to carry out that verdict. But things went horribly wrong. The botched execution – which took over 40 minutes – has renewed questions about the use of the death penalty.
- the actual execution costs taxpayers fairly little: while most states remain mum on the cost of lethal injections because of privacy concerns from pharmaceutical companies, it’s estimated that the drugs run about $100 (the Texas Department of Criminal Justice put the cost of their drug cocktails at $83 in 2011). However, the outside costs associated with the death penalty are disproportionately higher.
- “It’s 10 times more expensive to kill them than to keep them alive,”says Donald McCartin, known as The Hanging Judge of Orange County. McCartin knows a little bit about executions: he has sent nine men to death row.
- in Idaho, the State Appellate Public Defenders office spent about 44 times more time on a typical death penalty appeal than on a life sentence appeal (downloads as a pdf): almost 8,000 hours per capital defendant compared to about 180 hours per non-death penalty defendant.
- New York state projected that the death penalty costs the state $1.8 million per case just through trial and initial appeal.
- in Kansas, housing prisoners on death row costs more than twice as much per year ($49,380) as for prisoners in the general population ($24,690).
- in California, incarceration costs for death penalty prisoners totaled more than $1 billion from 1978 to 2011 (total costs outside of incarceration were another $3 billion). By the numbers, the annual cost of the death penalty in the state of California is $137 million compared to the cost of lifetime incarceration of $11.5 million.
- citing Richard C. Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center, Fox reported that studies have “uniformly and conservatively shown that a death-penalty trial costs $1 million more than one in which prosecutors seek life without parole.”
- an Urban Institute study found that “
n Maryland death penalty cases cost 3 times more than non-death penalty cases, or $3 million for a single case” while a 2004 Report from Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury Office of Research that claimed
- in Tennessee, death penalty trials cost an average of 48% more than the average cost of trials in which prosecutors seek life imprisonment.”
- a 2010 Duke University study found that taxpayers in the Tarheel State could save $11 million a year by substituting life in prison for the death penalty.
- prior to the abolishing the death penalty in the state, a report by New Jersey Policy Perspectives found that “New Jersey taxpayers over the last 23 years have paid more than a quarter billion dollars on a capital punishment system that has executed no one.”
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyph...g-the-death-penalty-your-tax-dollars-at-work/
