The Atlantic's November issue carries, "The Appeal of Death Row," written by Mary A. Fischer.
Experts on both sides of the death-penalty debate have long agreed that California’s system is the nation’s costliest and least efficient. This June, a landmark report by Paula M. Mitchell, a professor at Loyola Law School, and Arthur L. Alarcón, a senior judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, unearthed new data that reveal just how bad the system is.
Their report showed that since the current death-penalty statute was enacted in 1978, taxpayers have spent more than $4 billion on only 13 executions, or roughly $308 million per execution. As of 2009, prosecuting death-penalty cases cost upwards of $184 million more each year than life-without-parole cases. Housing, health care, and legal representation for California’s current death-row population of 714—the largest in the country—account for $144 million in annual extra costs. If juries continue to send an average of 20 convicts to San Quentin’s death row each year, and executions continue at the present rate, by 2030 the ranks of the condemned will have swelled to more than 1,000, and California’s taxpayers will have spent $9 billion to execute a total of 23 inmates.
“I was stunned by the report,” said Loni Hancock, a Democratic state senator from Oakland and a member of the senate budget committee. Hancock had spent the previous five months agonizing over deep cuts to California’s general budget, and “it broke my heart,” she said. “That’s when I decided the time had come for Californians to reconsider the death penalty.”
And:
For the time being, Governor Brown has no comment on this issue, says a spokesman. As governor in 1977, he vetoed a pro-death-penalty bill, and last April, he stopped a $356 million expansion of San Quentin’s death row, calling the cost “unconscionable” in a time of deep budget cuts to education and social services.
"Repeal of death penalty could save millions of dollars, analysis finds," is the title of Will Evans' post at California Watch.
A nonpartisan analysis of a California ballot initiative to abolish the death penalty found that it could save the state and counties in the "high tens of millions of dollars" every year.
The Legislative Analyst’s Office review of the proposed initiative, which hasn't been cleared for signature gathering yet, put it in the middle of a debate over what the death penalty costs and what should be done about it. Some critics of the death penalty think it actually costs much more than the analysis said, while supporters of capital punishment think executions should be streamlined, not stopped, in order to cut costs.
The initiative was proposed in August after a bill to repeal the death penalty stalled in the state Legislature. In addition to eliminating capital punishment, the measure would require those convicted of murder to work in prison and provide $100 million over four years to local law enforcement to help solve homicide and rape cases. The proposal likely faces a rough road ahead, as a recent Field Poll [PDF] found a strong majority of Californians want to keep capital punishment, even as an increasing number prefer life in prison without parole.
And:
Loyola Law School professor Paula Mitchell, co-author of a recent study on the cost of California's death penalty, said the analyst's office report "severely underestimated" costs to taxpayers. Her study [PDF], written with U.S. 9th Circuit Court Judge Arthur Alarcón, found that California has spent $4 billion on the death penalty since 1978 and $184 million in 2009 alone. It was critical of past estimates by the Legislative Analyst's Office.
Mitchell said it was disappointing that the latest report did not include the hundreds of millions of dollars it would take to build a new complex for death row inmates, "which will be required if California keeps the death penalty."
"If the initiative process in California is going to function as an effective part of the democratic process, voters MUST be fully informed about the full costs of the programs they are asked to vote for or against," Mitchell wrote in an e-mail.
Earlier coverage from California begins with reporting on the Field Poll.
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