The Death Penalty is a Waste

Three years ago, the door to California’s execution chamber was forced shut due to legal challenges to our state’s method of execution.  In that time, we have paid to keep up appearances of the death penalty for the not-so-bargain price of more than $400 million—that’s the cost of housing people in special facilities on death row and processing mandatory appeals.  In that same period, 15 people have died on death row from other causes—more people than the state has executed in the last 30 years.  We are, in effect, paying a premium for what is really permanent imprisonment, just so we can say we have a death penalty.

While California’s government has spent the last three years pretending nothing has changed, a tectonic shift has occurred in the national death penalty landscape. In December 2007, New Jersey became the first state in forty years to repeal the death penalty, replacing it with permanent imprisonment. Not long before New Jersey’s bold step, New York’s Supreme Court declared their state’s death penalty unconstitutional. The New York Legislature chose not to spend millions to revive it. This year, bills to replace the death penalty with permanent imprisonment are advancing in six states, from Montana to Maryland. The Republican and Democratic sponsors of these bills cite the enduring pain that the death penalty process inflicts on victim’s families, the risk that an innocent person will be executed, and the high costs of the death penalty system.

But perhaps more significant are the changes that have occurred are close to home, where these three years have given Californians the opportunity to scrutinize our criminal justice system and our budget priorities like never before.

Shortly after executions stopped, a bi-partisan panel of criminal justice experts began a three year probe into the state’s criminal justice system out of concern over the fact that more than 200 innocent people had been freed from prisons in California in just 15 years. This Senate appointed panel, known as the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice, produced a series of policy recommendations to stem wrongful convictions.  Implementing these reforms should have been a high priority. After all, every time an innocent person is wrongfully convicted, the guilty person remains on the streets.

But last year, two bills to implement the most urgently needed reforms were axed by the state’s budget disaster.

It is this last development—our tail-spinning economy and budget woes—that forces us now to ask tough questions about our public safety priorities.

This same bi-partisan panel of experts concluded that California’s death penalty is utterly broken and on the verge of collapse. To make the system functional on the most basic level, the Commission found we would have to spend a lot more money—more than $200 million annually.  We already pay over $137 million each year—above and beyond what it would cost to lock up these prisoners forever—just to keep up this pretense of a death penalty.  All of these additional costs would disappear if the 680 inmates now sentenced to death were condemned to permanent imprisonment instead.

It may be politically convenient for some district attorneys to declare that taxpayers should be willing to shoulder the burden of the death penalty, no matter the costs. But more and more former prosecutors, law enforcement and victims’ families are calling for an end to the hoax. Fifteen murder victims’ family members told the Senate-sponsored commission that the death penalty wastes money needed for other public safety priorities, like solving more murders and getting more dangerous people off the streets. Their comments were echoed by nearly fifty former prosecutors, judges, and law enforcement officers who all agree, we have more critical public safety needs and no more money to waste on the death penalty.

It’s time for California to invest in real justice for all, and stop wasting our money on symbolism for a few. 

Natasha Minsker is death penalty policy director for the ACLU of Northern California