Is the death penalty too expensive and ineffective to
keep? 

This November, California voters will have the chance to decide
on that question by voting for or against a ballot initiative
called SAFE (Savings
Accountability Full Enforcement), which would replace the death
penalty with life without possibility of parole as the state’s
maximum punishment.

Putting the moral issues of the death penatly aside, SAFE
proponents argue that California’s death penalty is costly to
taxpayers and broken beyond repair. 

“Over the last 32 years its cost California tax payers about 4
billion dollars to have the death penalty, and over that period
only 13 executions have been carried out,” says LMU Law Professor
Paula Mitchell.

Mitchell’s study, “Rethinking the
Death Penalty in California,” shows that once the death penalty
comes into play for a case, the legal costs skyrocket to an extra
$134 million dollars per year, well above the cost to implement
life without possibility of parole. Death penalty cases require
more attorneys, more experts, and an automatic review by the
California Supreme Court, making it a seemingly endless
process. 

“The average time on death row is now approaching 30 years,”
says former San Quentin Death Row Warden Jeanne Woodford. “So we
have more inmates on death row who have died by natural causes or
by suicide.”

Opponents of SAFE, such as Legal Director of the Criminal Justice Legal
Foundation Kent Scheidegger, say California simply needs
to streamline its system to emulate the process in states like
Virginia. 

“We need to speed up the review process. We are currently
spending far more than we need in both time and resources reviewing
claims that have absolutely nothing to do with whether the guy
committed the murder or not.” Scheidegger says.

Yet advocates for SAFE say that this would be a dangerous move,
not to mention extremely costly. Mitchell argues that it would cost
an extra $100 million per year to reform the existing system.

“And one of the dangers of this idea that we should just hurry
and speed things up is that it could result in cases where someone
who isn’t guilty or didn’t have a fair trial is being executed,”
Mitchell says.

About 7 minutes.

Written and Produced by Tracy Oppenheimer. Field producer is
Zach Weissmueller.

Go to Reason.tv for downloadable versions and subscribe
to ReasonTV’s
YouTube Channel to receive automatic updates when new
stories go live.