This year’s state budgetary crises have given death penalty opponents their most successful argument yet: money, writes law professor and ex-prosecutor Corinna Barrett Lain in the Christian Science Monitor. Just two states have abolished the death penalty in the past 40 years, New Jersey in 2007 and New Mexico in March. The cost of capital punishment played a key role in both decisions, and is driving current legislative attempts to repeal the death penalty in a number of other states.
She writes, “The bittersweet reality is that money, rather than morality, has become the tipping point for saving lives. Why? Administering the death penalty is breathtakingly expensive. Contrary to popular opinion, it costs substantially more to execute people than to send them to prison for the rest of their lives. In California, which houses the nation’s largest death row, it costs about $137 million annually to maintain the state’s death penalty system. The state has conducted only 11 executions since reinstating the death penalty in 1978, bringing the average cost per execution to $250 million.”