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Chicago Tribune
March 9, 2003
Death penalty's
price too high, and there's proof
Eric Zorn, Columnist
With the state in the worst budget crisis in its history--jobs and services
being eliminated or trimmed and the governor desperately hunting for
new sources of revenue--the death penalty has become a luxury we can
no longer afford.
Yes, a luxury.
Study after study
has shown us two things:
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Executing
convicted killers costs much more than keeping them in prison for
the rest of their lives.
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Executing
convicted killers does not deter other people from killing.
Both truths violate
popular assumptions about capital punishment and
together they reveal the capital punishment system as yet another
bloated and inefficient government program.
Think of it as
a pork-barrel project for the psyche--an expenditure of our
scarce dollars that accomplishes nothing other than to make people feel
good.
Dispatching murderers
with lethal injections of chemicals has a satisfying moral symmetry
in the view of a majority of the population as well as the survivors
of many of the victims who believe it offers closure and justice.
It's not free.
Capital cases cost
more at every level, from the trial through the numerous appeals to
make sure we're not executing the wrong person or anything, through
the imprisonment and even through the execution itself.
And in flush times,
proponents can plausibly lump it into the category of one of those crowd-pleasing,
government-sponsored frills, like parades, festivals and new sports
stadiums.
But now is no time
for frills. And in a happy coincidence, our state representatives, particularly
those who fancy themselves responsible conservatives, will have the
opportunity to exhibit their fiscal discipline by voting yes on legislation
to abolish the death penalty.
To the surprise
of many, that bill handily passed the House Judiciary Committee Thursday
with bipartisan support and has moved to the full House.
The cost issue
was mentioned only in passing during the committee hearing in Springfield
and is obviously not the main concern of the sponsors.
They are worried
about the fundamental arbitrariness in the system, the effects of wealth,
race and geography on who gets a lifesentence and who gets death, the
raft of human factors-- errors of omission and commission--that every
so often result in innocent people being sentenced to die.
Many proposals
now in the pipeline will at least mitigate some of these problems and
salve the conscience of lawmakers who want to continue supporting capital
punishment (This, for death penalty abolitionists, is the downside of
reform).
But none of these
proposals addresses the pocketbook issue, and some of them stand to
make capital justice even more expensive. We don't know just how much
extra we pay for this do-nothing government program in Illinois.
The Governor's
Commission on Capital Punishment considered sponsoring a study that
would try to isolate all the additional costs the death penalty imposes
on the police, the prosecution, the public defenders, the courts and
the prison system, but in the end decided to rely on research performed
elsewhere: A 2002 report from the Indiana Criminal Law Study Commission
found that the costs of maintaining that state's death penalty system
exceed the projected costs of maintaining a life-without-parole system
by 38 percent.
A 2000 analysis
by the Palm Beach Post that estimated Florida spends $51 million a year
simply to maintain the death penalty.
A 1993 Duke University
study found that going through the entire process required to execute
a prisoner costs $2.16 million more than keeping him locked up until
he dies of natural causes.
A 1992 calculation
by the Dallas Morning News showed that Texas spent an average of $2.3
million per execution, roughly the cost of keeping a
prisoner in single-cell maximum security for 120 years.
A 1999 estimate
presented to the Joint Legislative Budget Committee of the California
Legislature and passed along by the Death Penalty Information Center
said eliminating the death penalty would save the state government "at
least several tens of millions of dollars annually" and save combined
local jurisdictions "in the millions to tens of millions of dollars."
Yes, the probable
savings here would only run into the millions of dollars--not a big
chunk of an Illinois state budget deficit in the billions, but still.
In tough times, this is an easy choice.
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