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There are plenty of arguments for and against the death penalty. Some are political in the deepest sense; i.e., should the state have the power to take a life? Some are religious, though it might be noted that capital punishment occupies a central role in the Easter saga. Some are moral: No system is perfect, and if a democratic state executes an innocent person, then we all become murderers.
Another argument comes from criminology, that the death penalty serves as a deterrent. This one is easy to refute. You are about 120 times more likely to be killed by lightning in Colorado (three deaths in an average year) than to be executed (one execution in the past 40 years). Yet the threat of lightning does not deter people from going outdoors or climbing mountains, so why would the much less likely threat of lethal injection deter criminals?
State Rep. Paul Weissman, a Louisville Democrat, has come up with a new argument for repealing our seldom-applied death penalty. It costs a lot of public money to prosecute a death-penalty case, starting in district court and working through the required reviews and inevitable appeals. And often, tax money finances both sides of this expensive course when defendants are represented by public defenders.
That is as it should be. We want to be absolutely certain of the defendant's guilt, and that the trial was fair and just. Applying the death penalty should not be a casual matter.
Weissman argues that there are at least 1,000 unsolved murders in Colorado and that the state should take the money that has been going to death-penalty cases, and use it to fund a cold-case squad.
The state spends about $2 million a year on death-penalty cases, according to Weissman, and local governments (city police, county sheriffs, district attorneys) spend another $2.5 million. Some dispute those figures, but if we're going to calculate costs, we should include another factor -- that having the death penalty on the books might actually save money.
How?
The prosecutor meets with the defense attorney. I'll
take the death penalty off the table,
the D.A. says,
if your client will plead guilty and take life without
parole.
The client agrees, and Colorado taxpayers are
spared the expense of trying the case and the ensuing
decade or more of reviews and appeals. If there were no
death penalty on the books, then obviously this sort of
money-saving plea bargain would not occur.
How often does this happen?
Although it occurs frequently in TV dramas, I have no idea how often it happens in real-life. But if there's going to be a financial argument about the death penalty, then we ought to find out. Already there has been emotional testimony before the legislature about the need to solve cold cases, but what if there's no money to be had from repealing the death penalty?
The repealers do have one good point. As Howard Morton,
of the group Families of Homicide Victims and Missing
Persons, put it, Let's do first things first,
since
there's no point in arguing about penalties when we haven't
caught the murderers living in our
neighborhoods.
He is right about about priorities, but when it comes to
the death penalty, I always remember something a woman told
me about 20 years ago. I'm so glad they executed Ted
Bundy,
she said, so that I can go back to opposing
the death penalty.
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