In January 2000, the Republican governor of Illinois, George Ryan, halted all executions of death row inmates in his state when DNA tests proved that more of Illinois’s death row prisoners were innocent than they were guilty. A bill co-sponsored last month by Sen. Floyd Prozanski (D-South Lane and North Douglas counties) might bring Oregon one step closer to doing the same.
The Oregon Senate bill, however, is less concerned with the fact we might be executing innocent people and more concerned with the immense cost of putting people to death in a time when Oregon is strapped for cash. And when a financial bind forces your state to choose between raising the beer tax some 20-fold, laying off teachers or putting an end to executions, it’s pretty obvious which option looks most inviting.
One of the most counterintuitive facts of public policy involves the huge financial burden of the death penalty. The obvious assumption would be that it’s cheaper to put criminals to death than to house, feed, and clothe them in a prison for the rest of their natural lives. The reality, however, is just the opposite: It costs the state significantly more money to use the death penalty than it does to sentence a criminal to life without parole. The primary reason for this is simply the massive cost of court proceedings in death cases, first in conducting the trial by jury – estimated to cost the state about 10 times more than what it costs to conduct a non-capital trial – and second in defending the jury verdict against appeals. These legal fees quickly outstrip the cost of incarcerating a convict, as the personnel and facility costs of incarceration are incurred anyway as the convict is awaiting appeal decisions.
In fact, the only two cases where Oregon has executed anyone since the death penalty was reinstated here in 1984 have been for convicts who voluntarily ended their appeals and accepted their sentence. But as the consequence of abandoning a legal effort toward exoneration is death, very few inmates are willing to go this direction. Worse yet, it’s very hard to blame them when appeals courts have rejected the jury verdicts of nearly half of all of Oregon’s death row inmates – finding in many cases that their trials were not fairly conducted or that they were completely innocent in the first place, based upon new DNA evidence.
Death penalty proponents argue that the state could reduce costs and still kill prisoners by eliminating or restricting their right to appeal. This is largely true and some states, such as Texas, have found ways to make their executions cheaper by basically fast-tracking death cases through the appeals system, giving them less time in which they might be proven innocent. The reason this money-saving tactic is a bad idea? If we, the people of the state, execute a single innocent person, we have committed murder – pre-meditated, unjustified, and ultimately criminal. Furthermore, it is unlikely that fast-tracking would really reduce costs all that much – in Texas they have failed to achieve the kind of savings that could be realized by simply abolishing the punishment.
The bill moving through the Oregon Senate doesn’t even go this far. At the very most, it simply asks state prosecutors to consider the huge costs to the state when they decide to pursue the death penalty. With a budget shortfall that threatens to raise our tuition while cutting our services, this kind of financial prudence seems unquestionably reasonable. Frankly, the state should pursue whatever policy it can in order to reduce its costs. And if curtailing a morally defunct policy can help stave off budget cuts and tax hikes, then supporting this legislation seems like an obvious move.
[email protected]