"Former warden says California can’t afford death penalty," is by Mary Duan in the Monterey County Weekly.
From the time a death penalty case enters the court system in California, the count begins. There’s an estimated $40 million a year spent on death penalty cases at the county court level. Then $72 million a year goes for housing death penalty inmates in state prison. Another $58 million is spent on appealing death penalty cases to the state appellate court, and then $14 million is spent on federal appeals, including those that make it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
To put it more simply, as U.S. 9th Circuit Judge Arthur Alarcon and Loyola Law School Professor Paula Mitchell did in a 2011 report titled “Executing the Will of the Voters: A Roadmap to Mend or End the California Legislature’s Multi-Billion-Dollar Death Penalty Debacle,” it’s cost $308 million for each of the 13 executions carried out since California’s reinstated the death penalty in 1978.
Do the math: It’s slightly more than $4 billion spent on executing 13 people. And 725 inmates currently sit on death row. Do the math on that.
Jeanne Woodford knows the numbers intimately, but she knows another set of numbers just as well: 30-60 days. That’s the time she had, from the day a death warrant was signed by the governor to the actual night of an execution, to prepare her staff to kill an inmate at San Quentin State Prison, home to California’s death row.
And:
“I think it’s important to know we have a criminal justice problem in this state and the facts speak for themselves,” Woodford says. “Science tells you the best way to prevent crime is to solve it.” Instead of spending billions on a handful of people who, without the death penalty, will still die in prison with sentences of life without the possibility of parole, Woodford says a fraction of that $4 billion could go toward better policing.
“If you don’t have police on the streets and you’re not solving crime,” she says, “it makes us all less safe.”
Earlier coverage of Prop 34, the SAFE California ballot initiative, begins at the link.
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