The Cost of the Death Penalty - From Sea to Shining Sea

The question is being raised in New Hampshire and California.  In the Sunday Manchester Union Leader, Nancy West reported, "Capital questions: How much do death penalty cases cost?"

With two capital murder cases tried in the last month, some in New Hampshire are now questioning how much the cases will wind up costing the state -- in dollars and in the handling of other cases by the Attorney General's Office.

State Sen. Lou D'Allesandro wants a detailed explanation of how Attorney General Kelly Ayotte is spending the extra $1.4 million the legislative Fiscal Committee approved for prosecution of two capital murder cases.

And former prosecutor Barbara Keshen says other criminal cases must be getting short-changed because so many resources are being devoted to those cases.

D'Allesandro, a Manchester Democrat, said he supports the death penalty, but still wants to know where the money is going as the state scrambles to close a $200 million budget gap.

"I went to the governor's office and asked for an accounting of the money we have given (the Attorney General's Office.) There's got to be an accounting," D'Allesandro said.

D'Allesandro, vice chairman of the Fiscal Committee, wants the spending details before the committee meets Friday.

The two unrelated capital murder cases, the first two to go to trial in New Hampshire in half a century, already have cost the state millions of dollars. And that may be just the beginning if Michael Addison is sentenced to die for killing Manchester Police Officer Michael Briggs two years ago, experts say.

A jury last week found Addison, 28, guilty of capital murder in Briggs' death.

Starting tomorrow, jurors will determine if Addison should die. Earlier this month, a jury spared millionaire John J. Brooks the death penalty, saying the state failed to prove his murder of handyman Jack Reid Sr. in 2005 in Deerfield was committed in an "especially heinous, cruel or depraved manner."

And:

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said some states are looking more closely at costs associated with capital cases in determining whether to do away with the death penalty.

"It costs $3 million for typical states to arrive at one execution, allowing all costs of the death penalty system," Dieter said.

New York and New Jersey have both eliminated their death penalty statutes within the last year, citing cost as at least one of the factors, he said.

In California, Oakland Tribune columnist Daniel Borenstein asks, "Can California really afford the death penalty?"

The elapsed time between judgment and execution in California is 20 to 25 years, according to a report this year by the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice. That time span exceeds every other death penalty state in the nation.

As a result, California has about 670 inmates on death row, or roughly one out of every five death row inmates in the nation.

"With a dysfunctional death penalty law," the commission found, "the reality is that most California death sentences are actually sentences of lifetime incarceration. The defendant will die in prison before he or she is ever executed."

Indeed, of the 813 people sentenced to death in California between 1977 and 2007, more have died by natural causes (38) or suicide (14) than the 13 who have been executed.

In each county, it's up to the district attorney to decide whether to seek the death penalty. The state's current law, enacted by the Legislature in 1977 and amended by voters in 1978, provides for life in prison without parole or capital punishment for cases of first-degree murder that involve any of 21 "special circumstances," such as killing a police officer, a drive-by shooting, use of a hidden bomb or murder while attempting rape.

The death penalty process in California is lengthy and costly. It's difficult to find jurors for a trial because they must be open to the possibility of sentencing someone to die. Two trials must be held, one to determine guilt or innocence, the second to decide the sentence. From there, each death penalty sentence is automatically appealed to the state Supreme Court and federal District Court, with possible federal appeals as high as the U.S. Supreme Court.

Abolishing the death penalty, the commission concluded, would save well over $100 million a year. Money could be saved on the trial, on appeals and on the added cost of incarceration.

For example, the commission estimated, the cost of a trial increases by at least $500,000 when the defendant's life is at stake, and confinement on death row adds $90,000 per inmate to the normal annual incarceration bill of $34,150.

Last year, New Jersey abolished the death penalty in favor of life in prison without possibility of parole. The state's Death Penalty Commission concluded that it was costly, didn't deter crime and risked execution of innocent people. In signing the bill passed by the Legislature, Gov. Jon Corzine said that "state-endorsed killing" was wrong.

StandDown's cost index is here.