The Informant

Since 1978, California juries have sentenced about 800 convicts to death — of which only 13 have actually been executed. The rest either continue to wait on Death Row, or have already died of other causes. Meanwhile, California taxpayers have spent over $4 billion on administering a death penalty that, critics say, exists only on paper. What explains the delays — and the high cost? In a new report, the ACLU of Northern California provides a partial answer:

[Death Row] inmates are housed in single cells unlike other prisoners, and there are significant security costs. Death penalty trials cost up to 20 times more than trials for life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. In fact, death sentences are handed down after two trials, instead of one [a guilt phase and a penalty phase]. Taxpayers are legally required to pay for numerous appeals in death penalty cases, unlike cases involving life without possibility of parole, where the prisoner gets only one taxpayer funded appeal. In California, the average time between conviction and execution is now more than 25 years. This figure is likely to get even longer with budget pressures and challenges to the state’s lethal injection procedure.

I say this is only a partial answer because other states face similar structural and constitutional constraints, yet manage to carry out executions at a regular pace. For instance, this year alone, Texas has already executed seven prisoners with several more scheduled this summer. How does the Texas legal system move so much more quickly than ours? That would take a lot longer than a blog post to answer fully, but one reason is that Texas has historically been more tolerant of sloppy lawyering in capital cases. Then too, Texas doesn’t have to answer to the Ninth Circuit, the federal appeals court with jurisdiction over the West.  Continue reading →