Death penalty and hesitation to use it both cost California

LA Times March 14, 2005
When prison guards strapped 3-time killer Donald Beardslee to a gurney and administered a lethal injection just after midnight on Jan. 19, it was the 1st California execution in more than 3 years.

Beardslee, who in 1981 murdered two young San Francisco area women after he was paroled from a Missouri prison on another murder conviction, waited 21 years for his day of reckoning. He was 61 and had been on death row longer than the entire life span of one of his victims.

In the quarter century since Californians voted overwhelmingly to restore the death penalty, county prosecutors and juries have put more condemned murderers on death row in this state than in any other except Texas.

Despite the public's willingness to hand out death sentences, California is one of the more hesitant among the 38 capital punishment states to use the penalty, causing some to question if the enormous cost of capital punishment is worth the relatively few executions it produces.

California has 640 inmates on death row, about 20 % of the nation's total. But the state has accounted for only 1 percent of the nation's executions -- or 11 deaths -- since 1978, when the death penalty was restored.

"What we are paying for at such great cost," said Frank Zimring, a University of California, Berkeley law professor, "is essentially our own ambivalence about capital punishment. We try to maintain the apparatus of state killing and another apparatus that almost guarantees that it won't happen. The public pays for both sides."

According to state and federal records obtained by the Los Angeles Times, maintaining the California death penalty system costs taxpayers more than $114 million a year beyond the cost of simply keeping the convicts locked up for life and not counting the millions more in court costs needed to prosecute capital cases and hold post-conviction hearings in state and federal courts.

With 11 executions spread over 27 years, on a per-execution basis, California and federal taxpayers have paid more than a quarter of a billion dollars for each life taken at state hands.

Some savings

Capital punishment advocates argue that the death penalty saves money by eliminating state costs of housing the executed inmates. The rare California executions do produce some savings for the state. For example, had Beardsley lived to age 77, the average life expectancy for California males, it would have cost the state an additional $2 million to house him. But these kinds of savings make only a small dent in the overall sums needed to maintain the system.

Former California Attorney General Dan Lungren, now a Republican member of Congress from Sacramento, accuses capital punishment opponents of conducting a "war of attrition" against the death penalty, jacking up the cost and greatly prolonging appeals with the intent of making the process too expensive to keep up.

"I don't think society ought to be forced to give up the death penalty just because of actions by those who have been ratcheting up the costs," said Lungren, who helped write a 1996 federal law attempting to speed up capital case appeals. "It is very difficult to calculate the human costs or even the economic costs of those who are not killed because of the deterrence of capital punishment."

Other states execute much more rapidly than California. 11 other states -- led by Texas (337 executions), Virginia (94) and Oklahoma (75) -- account for 90 % of all executions in the last 27 years. This is partly because California, similar to other non-Southern capital punishment states, dedicates much more time and money to state and federal appeals.

[my note--Texas has carried out 340 executions, including 4 this year]

Another important factor is that the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, serving California and composed largely of Democratic appointees, is more likely to hear death penalty petitions than the more conservative appeals courts serving Texas (5th Circuit) and Virginia (4th Circuit).

"We don't turn them [executions] out the way a lot of Southern states do," California Chief Justice Ronald George said. "The virtue of our system is also its vice. We go to such lengths to minimize the possibility of error, and we've built in a lot of delay. The part I find most dysfunctional is that we have a delay of 3 to 4 years between the time of the death penalty judgment is imposed by the trial court and the time the defendant is appointed counsel."

George said that 115 death row inmates still have not been appointed lawyers for the 1st direct appeal to the state Supreme Court that is mandated by state law. And 149 lack lawyers for state habeas corpus and executive clemency petitions.

Because of the long appeals process, the delay between sentencing and execution in California averages nearly 20 years. As a result, there is a general graying of the population on death row. According to Department of Corrections statistics, 180 death row inmates are older than 50; 42 are older than 60.

Prison records show that California death row inmates are far more likely to die of natural causes than they are at the hands of the executioner.

Source: Los Angeles Times