Just a few days ago we reported on Governor Brown’s decision not to build the new death row, commenting that abolition would save even more. Today, Death Penalty Focus is circulating a cost-centered petition to Governor Brown to abolish the death penalty.
Please read and sign. This is our chance to take this crisis and galvanize it into something positive.
Death Penalty Focus is organizing a Day of Action to end the death penalty on June 30, 2009. The date is scheduled to coincide with the public hearing regarding the reformed execution proceedings using lethal injection, which we reported about here.
In keeping with the financial crisis and humonetarianism themes, here’s the ACLU of Northern California report on the costs of the death penalty and the potential savings that might result from its abolition, which we discussed here, here and here.
John Van de Kamp, former California AG, says we can’t afford the death penalty:
According to the final report of the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, which I chaired from 2006 to 2008, the cost of a murder trial goes up by about half a million dollars if prosecutors seek the death penalty. Confinement on death row (with all the attendant security requirements) adds $90,000 per inmate per year to the normal cost of incarceration. Appeals and habeas corpus proceedings add tens of thousands more. In all, it costs $125 million a year more to prosecute and defend death penalty cases and to keep inmates on death row than it would simply to put all those people in prison for life without parole.
Van de Kamp advocates eliminating the death penalty and commuting all death sentences in
Doing so would incapacitate some of the worst of the worst for their natural lives, and at the same time ensure that a person wrongfully convicted will not be executed. And it would save $125 million each year.
Getting rid of the death penalty would undoubtedly be a great thing for the administration of justice in California, but Life Without Parole does have its own implications. To name a few: what about all the pending appeals and habeas proceedings? How would the Corrections Department transition all those folks from death row? Would the debate over “how much” due process we think we can afford change without the morally-fraught death penalty to galvanize it?
Reformers are taking advantage of the suddenly inflated salience of cost to the public to push for policies that were total non-starters just a year ago, but the dark side of this strategy is that there is also no willingness to implement these policies in a thoughtful, rather than merely a cost-avoidant, way. How much deeper a hole will we be in a year from now if all our decisions are made with an eye on short-term costs?
(image courtesy NYT.com)
The New York Times reports on a trend we’ve already seen here a couple of times: penal reform and punitive measures being abandoned not on their merits, but because of their costs. The article is not California-specific; the picture you see is from Virginia, and the data in the piece come from Maryland.
Nevertheless, the point is an interesting one: whatever the public thinks about the death penalty, it’s expensive, and several states are abandoning it in light of the costs.
Death penalty opponents say they still face an uphill battle, but they are pleased to have allies raising the economic argument.
Efforts to repeal the death penalty are part of a broader trend in which states are trying to cut the costs of being tough on crime. Virginia and at least four other states, for example, are considering releasing nonviolent offenders early to reduce costs.
What about the CA costs? The California Commission for the Fair Administration of Justice provides some data. The report offers abundant information on other aspects of death penalty administration, pointing primarily to long delays in carrying sentences and to inadequate representation. However, if the fiscal argument is the one that might win the day, the bottom line is as follows:
The additional cost of confining an inmate to death row, as compared to the maximum security prisons where those sentenced to life without possibility of parole ordinarily serve their sentences, is $90,000 per year per inmate. With California’s current death row population of 670, that accounts for $63.3 million annually.
The report makes a variety of suggestions regarding reforms in death penalty administration, including guarantees for adequate representation. Those in themselves might be quite costly, and the public might be as reluctant to implement them as the legislators were when they killed the planned expansion to the San Quentin Death Row just a little while ago. One wonders how the new trend in other states may play out in California, or at least in counties in which the prosecution actually seeks the death penalty.