The Orange Fox Network

Does it really cost more for our government to sentence someone to death than life in prison? Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “The truth is more important than the facts.” His words display the importance of looking past the facts, which are easily skewed. For example, the average price for a death penalty trial ranges from 48 to 3,000% more than the average trial, but with the number of death penalty trials around three thousand per year one big trial, such as the Laci Peterson trial, can throw of the average cost by hundreds of thousands of dollars. Also, the cost of trials in which prosecutors sought the death penalty and lost might be factored in the death penalty average. It would be more accurate and true to the real data if the Department of Justice’s statisticians used a median value with this data. Whether or not the DOJ statisticians include death penalty trials in the average trial costs is yet another thing to consider.

It costs $57,000 per year to house a convict in a maximum security prison in California, but it could cost ninety-nine cents, plus court costs, to kill someone in Oklahoma. This shows that the cost of carrying out the death sentence is quite cheap, so what exactly makes the death sentence so expensive? The bureaucracy of the judicial branch causes this high price. When “interest” groups like the ACLU criticize the high costs, and then wage “war” in the court rooms creating an even higher cost it helps nobody.

Say a twenty-one year old man committed a murder and was witnessed by three people. If his trial cost 1 million dollars, about 50% more than the average life-in-prison trial, sat in prison for 20 years, then was put to death by a one thousand dollar shot of Pancuronium bromide the total process would cost a staggering 2.14 million dollars. However, assuming he was convicted, sentenced to life in a maximum security prison, and lives to the current life expectancy of 72 years of age, the process of justice would cost an even more staggering 3.4 million dollars. This demonstration illustrates how some people are wrong when they say that the death sentence is always more expensive than a life-in-prison.

Numbers aren’t everything. The most important thing to remember is that justice is priceless. The death penalty was created with the intent that it would deter criminals from committing heinous crimes, but this idea is both false and poorly founded because the criminals that commit crimes worthy of a death sentence are so physiologically complex already that the consequences mean nothing to them. If these death sentenced people were rational, logical people, who loved life, then we could safely assume that the death penalty would decrease violent and heinous crimes. Where there is a will, there is a way, which is why hard labor or solitary confinement may not work either. It all comes down to what one calls justice, as well as, how much they believe in justice.

# posted by jn @ 10:05 PM