|
||||
  
 
 |
Life sentences: Not easy on taxpayers' pockets By
Sam Springer As prisoners sit on death row, many taxpayers can be heard complaining about the cost of keeping the prisoner alive for a number of years preceding execution. If you happen to be one of the tax payers that is complaining, do you have any idea of the actual cost of an execution? I will try to provide a minimum estimate. Estimates of the cost of capital punishment will inevitably vary greatly, since estimating the cost of each execution requires multiplying the excess cost of a capital trial by the number of capital trials, and then dividing the result by the number of executions. Let us then use the cost figures for Texas given by the Death Penalty Information Center, who quoted estimates made by two Texas counties. These counties estimated the cost of a capital trial at between $400,000 and $600,000. If we subtract the cost of a non-capital murder trial ‹$75,000‹from the median of these estimates, we get about $425,000 to try each capital defendant. If we assume that juries will pass a death sentence in 80 percent of all capital trials, and that the appeal courts will continue to invalidate about 30 percent of all death sentences, we can assume that about 50 percent of all capital trials will result in an actual execution; so the actual cost of each execution (counting only the initial trial costs) comes in at $850,000. Invested productively, at a conservative five percent rate of return, that sum would yield $45,000 per year; more than enough to support a "lifer" in jail indefinitely, with enough money left over to go some distance toward hiring an additional jail guard or police officer. No estimate I know of that allows for the cost of spending a large sum of money in a single lump arrives at any conclusion but this; indeed, a Florida study arrived at a total cost (for each execution) of over two million dollars. Capital punishment does cost more than any other penalty exacted by the criminal justice system; even my estimates (which reflect only the cost of the original trials, and not appeals, death row housing, or execution infrastructure costs) come to this conclusion. These numbers validate your complaints with respect to the actual cost of keeping a death row inmate locked up for years before they are actually executed. The complaint that should be focused on is whether or not voters should allow for inmates to sit as long on death row as they do.
|
Archived Months:
January
1999 January
2000 January
2001 |
||