Killing California’s Costly Death Penalty
4th May 2014
This sort of thing is why tReason magazine has to be treated with heaping doses of skepticism.
“Over the last 32 years its cost California tax payers about 4 billion dollars to have the death penalty, and over that period only 13 executions have been carried out,” says LMU Law Professor Paula Mitchell.
So the basic argument is that maintaining an apparatus for executing prisoners isn’t c0st effective because (and I am not making this up) not enough prisoners are being executed to justify the money spent.
Mitchell’s study, “Rethinking the Death Penalty in California,” shows that once the death penalty comes into play for a case, the legal costs skyrocket to an extra $134 million dollars per year, well above the cost to implement life without possibility of parole. Death penalty cases require more attorneys, more experts, and an automatic review by the California Supreme Court, making it a seemingly endless process.
And the obvious reason for this is that bleeding-hearts in the legislature and the courts (not to mention the mob) have placed so many fetters on the justice system when it comes to executions that it’s not surprising that the costs have skyrockets. Get rid of the administrative and technical bottlenecks, and even these tender souls would be surprised at how cheap the death penalty becomes. But, of course, that’s not what they’re after; they’re after a political objective that can’t be obtained through legitimate democratic political activity and has to be effected by such intellectual sleight-of-hand as this.
This is exactly on a par with the guy who murdered his parents and then pled for clemency on the basis of being an orphan, and not too far removed from the statists (and there are more of them writing for tReason magazine than you might think) who put in place programs to pay for people’s medical procedures and then claim the power to regulate behavior based on the fact that certain things are costing the taxpayer more money than is proper.