Then if the law does not demand that the Death Penalty perhaps you can answer another question. Oh BTW I am impressed that you told the truth.
How much money does it cost to carry out the death penalty versus holding the convince in prison for life without parole?
The difference is a lot more than you think. It costs at least a $1,000,000 more to execute someone. Seriously. The 1976 Supreme Court decision included the standard that a meaningful appeals process must be used during a death penalty case. That means the taxpayers foot the bill for lawyers on both sides. So a sentence of Death takes an average of 17 years to carry out and lawyers are paid the entire time for both the convicted and the prosecution.
Additionally it is estimated that it cost an additional $90,000 a year to hold someone on "death row" versus life in general population.
So the question. What is gained by a process that cost $90,000 a year to hold the prisoner for the average of 17 years and cost an another million dollars minimum for appeals versus life without parole?
Don't care. There are guarantees that come with execution: the perp will never again be able to harm an innocent person, or get freed by a judge or a POTUS. We don't execute people to save money, we do it to remove the murderer from society.
No we don't. We do it for revenge. If we wanted to remove them from society then putting them in a hole and forgetting about them is faster, cheaper, and far more efficient while being even more effective.
Appeals for those serving life without parole are not automatic as death penalty cases are. That means nobody is going to file an appeal. What the death row inmate has is hope. Hope for a new trial on some technicality or some new evidence. Evidence that dozens of people are pouring over constantly. The person serving life without has no such hope. Any minor inconsistency in the trial can and often is grounds for a new trial. The death row inmate will often get two or sometimes even three new trials because of some minor technicality.
Life without parole is actually far more cruel if you are looking to make the baddie suffer. I mentioned hope above. A decade goes by and visitation from family dwindles because they know the baddie is never getting out. There is time and they can skip this week for a trip with friends. Life goes on in other words.
It is far more likely that the death penalty case will get that commutation to simple life which means they are eligible for parole. It happened in Indiana. A cop killer got out of prison despite being sentenced to death three times.
Gary officer's family outraged as his killer is released from prison
Those automatic appeals work. Not all the time, or even most of the time, but often enough to give the baddie hope.
So it is cheaper, more effective, and far easier to go with life without parole. It is also more cruel, and safer for the community.
That leaves the real reason we sentence people to death. Revenge. We want the satisfaction of watching the man die, hoping to see him cry out. Hoping to see the fear in his eye, or see him struggle and be forced onto the gurney. But that never happens. The condemned has time to accept his fate, and seek salvation through religion, through faith. Plus they give the condemned sedatives to calm them down just so they don't have a scene like the one above.
No one fights for the life without parole convict like they do for the death penalty sentence. They put them in a hole and forget about them.
I don't agree that we do it for revenge, but whatever, we don't do it to save money.
I've demonstrated that each argument in favor is at best wrong. It doesn't remove the criminal from society. Life without parole is very rarely commuted or overturned unless there is DNA evidence that proves the convicted didn't do the crime. While that happened far more frequently with death penalty cases.
So the only thing left is revenge. Unless you are less honest with yourself than you were here in this thread.
Look at the link I provided again. Three trials. Three guilty findings. Three times he was sentenced to death. Each time a small technical error in the trial was enough for a new trial to be granted. Finally the DA decided to go with the equivalent of a plea bargain. A year later the cop killer was released with time served.
Why would the DA do it? Well the conviction was based largely on witnesses. Those witnesses were getting older and more reluctant to testify again and again. The State was getting tired of paying for trials over and over again.
Eventually the witnesses would be unavailable. Either from moving or death in the natural cycle. Eventually the appeals court would rule that the State had flubbed it one too many times and overturn the conviction. So a cop killer goes free. All because someone wanted to make a statement about being tough on crime and showing that they supported the police.
How does that make the victims family feel better? I'm sure they were sick of the trials being done over and over again. The constant legal wrangling and nitpicking over the minutiae were certainly infuriating.
How much better off would they be if they heard life without parole? Knowing that the guilty would never be free again would put closure on the wound wouldn't it?
But instead they wanted to go for the big win and they lost it all. The cop killer is free. The cop is still dead. The family could never move on because of the trials and then more trials. Pain, frustration, anger, and no closure.
If you want to punish the guilty. Then life without parole is the answer.
Ohio executes Brett Hartmann in slaying of Highland Square woman
I knew one of the relatives in that case. I saw what it does to the family. The execution took fifteen years. A decade and a half of living nightmare. Always wondering if the guilty would go free. Always wondering if new trials would start it all over again.
He said he had no desire to spend the rest of his life in prison and was hoping to win a second trial and secure additional DNA testing. He said his family knows he is innocent, and he hopes the search for Snipes’ true killer continues.
“I think we’re lucky on death row because we have an out,” Hartmann said. “It’s a harsh structure in prison, but at least we’re not in for 50 to 60 years. Death row is its own little enigma. We are in our own little world.
“But being locked up and away from family, it’s tough. I’m tired of fighting and no one listening. I’m tired of begging for money [and tired] of prison. So, there’s some relief.”
He said to the Warden "I'm good, let's roll".
Fifteen years before closure could even begin.
