Jason1977
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- #61
Bullshit.I'm agaisnt the death penalty, mostly due to cost. However I don't really care what crime they are guilty of , the retarded and children should never be put to death. Period.
It's actually more expensive to feed, clothe & provide preventative medical care to inmates than it is to execute them. Gas tablets, Electricity, lethal injection... cheaper than a years worth of food alone.
Charles M. Harris, JD, Senior Judge of the Fifth District Court of Appeal in Florida, published the following in an opinion piece for The Gainesville Sun, on Apr. 18, 2012, available at gainesville.com:
"...[D]eath by execution is excessively expensive. Most people who support the death penalty believe it is more cost effective than life in prison. Perhaps at one time, when executions were swift and sure, this may have been the case. It is not now. Most people knowledgeable about the subject will agree that the delay now built into the system, more trial preparation, much longer time to get to trial, much longer jury selections and trials, much more complicated and far more frequent appeals, and continuous motions, have increased the cost of capital punishment so that it is now many times the cost of keeping a prisoner in prison for life."
Arthur L. Alarcon, LLB, Senior Judge for the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and Paula M. Mitchell, JD, Adjunct Professor of Law at Loyola Law School, wrote the following in the June 2011 article “Executing the Will of the Voters?: A Roadmap to Mend or End the California Legislature’s Multi-Billion-Dollar Death Penalty Debacle,” published in Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review:
"Our research has revealed that $4 billion of state and federal taxpayer money has been expended administering the death penalty in California since 1978, with a cost in 2009 of approximately $184 million above what taxpayers would have spent without the death penalty… These totals do not include the additional funds the state is poised to spend to maintain the current broken system...
In cases in which a defendant faces a maximum penalty of life without the possibility of parole, rather than the death penalty, there is no penalty phase trial at all. Thus, the government would not incur these costly expenditures if the death penalty were abolished…
The costs associated with death penalty trials that took place between 1983 and 2006 averaged about $1 million more per trial than the costs of average non–death penalty homicide trials. This conclusion is also supported by the fact that there are several significant, easily identifiable costs incurred in every death penalty trial that are not incurred in non–death penalty homicide."
Does the death penalty cost less than life in prison without parole? - Death Penalty - ProCon.org
left out the appeals, etc etc etc. investigations etc etc etc...my bad.
~this stuff goes on for other inmates as well, not just death row. 99.99% of inmates are innocent (lol). They all get these investigations, appeals, etc. It costs more for capital inmates. But we're talking about the cost of the process of appeals, investigations. Not the cost of execution. Those are the costs leading up to execution. They're also cases where there's wiggle room for getting a shot at an appeal. I wonder if it's like that for those open & shut cases.
I guess what it boils down to is if a judge is 100% convinced the evidence was sufficient, then he should drop the hammer & sentence them to death. If he isn't 100% convinced, then he should use his discretion & waive the death penalty & give em life w/o parole. I'm sure this happens anyway in some cases. I don't know, I suppose the whole thing is stupid. I mean, why have a death penalty when you know it's going to suck resources dry?
Don't mind me, I'm kinda thinking outloud...lol.
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