Death Penalty Study: $184 Million a Year in California

They examined a combination of state, federal and local expenditures for capital cases over three years to estimate the additional costs of capital trials over and above the cost of a standard murder trial.

That may not sound like a tremendous amount in a state with budget deficits in the tens of billions, but put it this way: Taxpayers have spent more than $4 billion on capital punishment in California since 1978 when the death penalty was reinstated.  Over that time, they have executed 13 people.  That means that there was about $308 million spent on each executed prisoner.

And it gets worse.  They further calculate the cost of maintaining the death penalty will climb to $9 billion by 2030, as San Quentin’s death row will increase to over 1000 people.

According to an article in the LA Times, “Alarcon and Mitchell obtained California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation records that were unavailable to others who have sought to calculate a cost-benefit analysis of capital punishment.”

The authors develop three possible options to deal with the reality of spiraling costs and infrequent executions.

First, we can fully preserve capital punishment with an estimated $85 million per year in funding for courts and attorneys.

Second, there can be a reduction in the number of death penalty-eligible crimes.  This would save about $55 million per year.

Finally we could abolish capital punishment which would save about $1 billion every five or six years.

Judge Alarcon is not an opponent of the death penalty.  He told the LA Times that he believes “the majority of California voters will want to retain some option for punishing the worst criminals with death.”  On the other hand, Professor Mitchell is an opponent. 

It was Judge Alarcon who, in 2007, issued “an urgent appeal for overhaul of capital punishment in the state, noting that the average lag between conviction and execution was more than 17 years, twice the national figure. Now it is more than 25 years, with no executions since 2006 and none likely in the near future because of legal challenges to the state’s lethal injection procedures.”

The LA Times adds, “Unless profound reforms are made by lawmakers who have failed to adopt previous recommendations for rescuing the system, Alarcon and Mitchell say, capital punishment will continue to exist mostly in theory while exacting an untenable cost.”

Among their findings to be published next week in the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review:

The state’s 714 death row prisoners cost $184 million more per year than those sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

A death penalty prosecution costs up to 20 times as much as a life-without-parole case.

The least expensive death penalty trial costs $1.1 million more than the most expensive life-without-parole case.

Jury selection in a capital case runs three to four weeks longer and costs $200,000 more than in life-without-parole cases.

The state pays up to $300,000 for attorneys to represent each capital inmate on appeal.

The heightened security practices mandated for death row inmates added $100,663 to the cost of incarcerating each capital prisoner last year, for a total of $72 million.

The LA Times also notes, “In their report, Alarcon and Mitchell raise the prospect of costly new legal challenges to the state’s handling of capital inmates because of the dozens who have died while waiting for lawyers to be assigned for their appeals. Of the 92 death row inmates who have died since 1978, only 13 were executed in California and one was executed in Missouri, while 54 died of natural causes, 18 by suicide and six by inmate violence or undetermined causes.”

Here is an appalling stat.  “Federal judges find fault with about 70% of the California death row prisoners’ convictions and send them back to the trial courts for further proceedings, the report noted. That could make the state vulnerable to charges of denying inmates due process, the authors warned.”

There is a temptation for supporters of the death penalty to argue that the primary problem with the death penalty is that the process is too slow, that there are too many appeals.

Last month, Jeanne Woodford, a San Quentin Warden who is now heading up an anti-death penalty group, pointed out that we have “too many innocent people on our death rows, to even think that it ought to be quicker and then, as with the discovery of DNA, there are things we just don’t know out there that might prove that other people are innocent, as we have found with the DNA. So, you know, we don’t have a perfect criminal justice  system and we never will, and just from a practical checkpoint, we can’t afford to even have the possibility that we might execute an innocent person.”

She said that as more and more evidence comes forward about wrongful convictions, we see people using the argument about the speed of the process and cutting appeals to less and less.  “We’re now able to, you know, put up in front of them, the pictures of people who would have been executed, if we had been too quick to justice, or what was called justice,” Jeanne Woodford told the Vanguard.

However, the report finds that at least some of these delays could be artificial.

The LA Times reports, “All of the examinations have pointed to a shortage of death penalty-qualified attorneys in the state as a prime cause of the delays in handling appeals from death row prisoners. At the time of the commission’s report, it took an average of 10 years for a condemned inmate to get his death sentence reviewed by the California Supreme Court, as required by law.”

They add, “Michael Millman, executive director of the California Appellate Project, says more than 300 inmates on death row are waiting to have attorneys assigned to work on their state appeals and federal habeas corpus petitions. He says there are fewer than 100 attorneys in the state qualified to handle capital cases because the work is dispiriting and demanding and the compensation inadequate.”

On the other hand, death penalty advocates claim that the low number of death-qualified attorneys is deliberate.

“Choking off the appeals is part of the strategy” of those opposed to capital punishment, Kent Scheidegger, legal director for the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation told the LA Times.  Mr. Scheidegger claims the problem is due to “unnecessarily elaborate state court requirements for taking on death penalty cases.”

But even states with less onerous requirements have high costs and long delays.

The bottom line once again, why the expensive path when there is a perfectly reasonable alternative in life without parole?

Jeanne Woodford argued that, from the standpoint of the victims, life without out the possibility of parole is the way to go.

“The lifer with no possibility of parole brings closure to the legal aspects of the case.  I don’t know if there’s anything that can undo the harm of individuals, and certainly, carrying out an execution just does not, from my experience, bring any relief to the family.”

As stated,  she believes life without parole would bring closure, at least to the legal aspect of the case.  Then the family members would not have to worry, or continue to address or deal with the issue any further.  Instead, they are brought forward again to relive these crimes.

California, where more than 700 men and women are on death row, has not conducted an execution since January, 2006, due to challenges to the state’s lethal injection protocols.  A 2010 Lake Research Partners poll showed that a clear majority of voters nationwide (61%) and in California (62%) would prefer a punishment other than the death penalty for first-degree murder.

A recent poll by David Binder Research found that 63% of California voters would support converting the sentences of everyone on death row in California to life without the possibility of parole to save the state more than $1 billion in five years.

—David M. Greenwald reporting