The Cost of Death v. Life

A common refrain in the anti-death penalty world is that imposing capital punishment doesn’t make sense because it’s more costly to the State than imposing life without parole (LWOP). Several people have asked me where this statement comes from and I decided to do a bit of research to figure out what the scoop is.

The argument that a death sentence is more expensive than LWOP centers on the differences in cost between a capital trial versus one where the maximum sentence is LWOP. Though the cost of employing the prosecutors may be a fixed cost to the taxpayer no matter what kind of case is being tried (i.e. the prosecutors’ salary has to be paid either way), a death penalty trial is more expensive than other trials because it requires two phases, the first to determine the defendant’s guilt and the second to determine the defendant’s punishment, and because it involves significantly more pretrial preparation. Some state attorney generals also have prosecutor divisons devoted exclusively to capital trials.

According to the Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center, Richard Dieter, in his January 2005 testimony before the New York State Assembly, a death penalty trial and the appeals that immediately follow it make a death sentence more costly than LWOP, even if a lifetime incarceration is more expensive than incarcerating an inmate until they’re executed. (note: many death sentences are not carried out because 68% of them are overturned on appeal, and 82% of those reversals result in a sentence of LWOP). Ultimately, Mr. Dieter’s point is that “a million dollars spent today is a lot more costly to the state than a million dollars that can be paid gradually over 40 years.” Mr. Dieter backed up his testimony by pointing to numerous studies calculating the costs of the death penalty versus LWOP in particular states, including a 1992 analysis presented in the Dallas Morning News that found that a death penalty trial costs an average of $2.3 million, or three times the average cost of imprisoning someone in a maximum security cell for 40 years.

Of course, there’s always another side to the story. According to a 1997 report by Dudley Sharp, the Death Penalty Resources Director for Justice for All (www.jfa.net) (Mr. Sharp’s paper is on www.prodeathpenalthy.com), LWOP is $1.2M - $3.6M more expensive than execution because the State must bear the cost of keeping the prisoner in state custody for the rest of their life. This figure is reached based on the dubious assumption that an LWOP prisoner is incarcerated 50 years verses only six years for a person on death row. Nevertheless, the overall point is that a life sentence is more expensive than a death sentence because it involves a longer period of incarceration.

Though my sympathies lie with the anti-death penalty stance, I don’t think that advocates on either side of the fence should put too much weight on a financial cost comparison as the primary motivation for abolishing or for continuing to impose the death penalty. That’s partly because the numbers can clearly be manipulated either way, but also because there are many other issues underlying the death penalty that I think are more important. For example, we must answer how and whether the death penalty furthers the pursuit of justice; whether the death penalty acts as a deterrent against crime and/or achieves moral retribution for the commission of particularly heinous acts (a la an “eye for an eye”); whether the state or a jury of peers has the power to decide that an individual has not only forfeited their right to live among society but also their right to live at all; whether we have made sufficient technological and forensic advancements to avoid putting an innocent person to death; and, finally, whether the widespread international criticism that this country has faced in imposing the death penalty should influence our system of punishment.