A Strange Investment for a Capitalist Country

What does the public get from this sorry charade? It gets the bill. Hayseeds and urbanites alike are taken to the cleaners. The Judicial Conference of the United States estimates that the defense cost alone (and since virtually all defendants are penniless, the taxpayer picks up the tab) is four times higher in death-penalty cases than in cases where death isn't sought. And prosecution costs are 67 percent higher than defense costs. The cost of running a Supreme Court in a big state is enormous, and the Supreme Courts in states like California and Texas will spend more than half their time sorting through death-row appeals. Then there are the construction costs of making death rows extra secure, salaries for special guards and the cost of special recreation areas, etc.

The New York Times recently interviewed officials in the twelve states that have no death penalty; all were delighted not to be bogged down in the expensive swamp. The press in other states reports cries of pain. The Sacramento Bee estimates that California's bill for processing death-penalty cases between 1977 and 1993 came to $1 billion--although only two people were executed during that time. The Dallas Morning News figures that sending a killer to death row costs an average of $2.3 million, or about three times the cost of imprisoning someone in a single cell at the highest security level for forty years (forty years is the stiffest sentence available in Texas, next to the death penalty). In Indiana, a capital case costs about $4 million--and that's just to get to the appellate stage. David Cook, a former death-penalty prosecutor, complained to the Indianapolis Star/News, "If you're gonna spend this type of money in a system where there isn't much resources to go around, I think that we have a reasonable right to expect that we're gaining something by doing this.... We don't gain anything by doing this."

Counties bear much, and sometimes all, the cost of these trials, and smaller counties would almost rather ignore a murderer than go broke trying to kill him. The district attorney in the Ogeechee Circuit in east Georgia said, sure, there were criminals in his district who deserved to die, but trying a death-penalty case "in a county of 8,000 people might bankrupt the county. How do you do it?" In Mississippi, small counties quarrel fiercely over which side of the county line the body was found on--neither wanting to take on the cost of the trial. In Washington State two counties were sucked so dry by murder trials that they had to lay off personnel and suspend plans for replacing broken equipment. It cost Suffolk County and New York State $2.3 million in 1999 to convict Robert Shulman of murder, which Newsday noted is twice what it would have cost the state to keep him in prison until he is 85. The Daily News got into the act by predicting that by the time Shulman is ultimately executed, his appeals and the trials and appeals of others processed in the meantime will have cost the state about $408 million.

Maybe that's an exaggeration, but whatever the cost, Professor James Acker, a death-penalty expert, stated the obvious: "The return on the dollar of these investments is really quite poor." And nowhere poorer than in Florida, where the Palm Beach Post estimated that the death penalty has cost the state $51 million a year above and beyond what it would have cost to punish all first-degree murderers with life in prison without parole. That averages out to $24 million for each of the forty-four executions in Florida since 1979.

The Long, Long Wait for Revenge

Again, the question: What's the profit from pumping so much money into this strange punishment? Deterrence? Since the 1970s, the South has carried out 80 percent of the executions, and its murderers are still the busiest in the nation. On May 25, 1979, guards at the Florida penitentiary dragged John Spenkelink, gagged and struggling, into the execution chamber, strapped him into the chair and threw the switch. Surely that made would-be murderers think twice, didn't it? No. In the three years before his execution, Florida averaged 904 murders annually; in the three years after, the number averaged 1,440--a 59 percent increase.

Better than statistics in this debate are the instincts of those who have spent their lives trying to control violence. The nation's police chiefs certainly don't seem to have much confidence in the death penalty as a deterrent. Responding to a 1995 Hart Research Poll, only 1 percent said expanding the death penalty would help reduce violent crime.

Revenge? Is that what you want for your money? Well, there are plenty of men and women on the nation's death rows who rightly provoke that desire: mass murderers, murderers who killed for fun, murderers who killed for hire, who raped and tortured women, who raped and tortured children. There is, of course, a wide range of savagery represented on death row. Some is relatively simple, like the Georgian who killed his lover by jamming a screwdriver into his ear and twisting it, then tried to get rid of the body by cutting it up and flushing it down the garbage disposal.

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