The complexity, length and finality of death penalty trials drive their costs through the roof – drawing critical and scarce human and fiscal resources away from law enforcement and victims’ services while driving up local taxes.
Death penalty costs in Ohio?
Ohio has never conducted a comprehensive study of death penalty costs to the state. Such a study is needed to determine the true price tag and resulting trade-offs of our state’s capital punishment system.
Although a true examination of costs has not taken place, there is some cobbled information on parts of the systemic costs. Wilford Berry’s case, for example, cost up to 10% of the capital-crimes section of Ohio’s annual budget for a full five years.
According to a two-year study by the Ohio Associated Press, prosecutors in smaller counties and defense attorneys and county officials across the state feel that Ohio's death penalty is squeezing their budgets. Case in point, Vinton County’s entire court system was shut down for three weeks during the death penalty trial of George McKnight. What's more, the victim's family now says they don’t want McKnight to be executed. They are asking the Governor to commute McKnight’s sentence to life without parole.
Six months after a month-long capital trial in Delaware County, the prosecutor’s team of 10 lawyers was still working through a backlog of over 500 felony indictments.
Ohio pays for the high up-front costs of the death penalty even when those cases result in a life sentence. In 2007, more than 90% of death penalty cases resulted in a sentence of life without parole.
The death penalty costs more than life without parole
The cost of adjudicating a murder case is far more complex than it may appear on the surface. In more than 15 different studies in just as many states, researchers have found that maintaining capital punishment has proven more expensive than a system of life without parole as the maximum sentence for murder.
The majority of the death penalty’s high costs never appear as line items in any budget. They are buried in the thicket of legal proceedings and hours of time spent by judges, clerks, prosecutors and other law enforcement agencies – time that could be better spent prosecuting and sentencing scores of other non-capital cases.
When crimes go unsolved or prosecutors’ offices are too overburdened to prosecute them, those responsible are free to commit more and increasingly serious crimes.
Death penalty cases are more expensive at every stage of the judicial process, racking up exorbitant costs even before a single appeal is filed. Compared to non-death cases, death penalty cases involve:
More pre-trial preparations; more pre-trial motions; more experts hired by both the prosecution and the defense; two defense lawyers instead of one; a much longer and more complicated jury selection process; a two-phase trial – the first phase to determine guilt or innocence, and the second phase for sentencing; additional experts, investigation, and evidence for the sentencing phase; multiple appeals that can last years or decades; and housing on death row that is more expensive than maximum security.
State studies consistently demonstrate the high cost of capital punishment:
Maryland taxpayers have paid at least $37.2 million for each of the state's five executions since 1978, when the state re-enacted the death penalty. According to a study prepared by the Urban Institute, the average cost for reaching a single death sentence is $3 million, $1.9 million more than the cost of a non-death-penalty case.
A 1993 study conducted by Duke University found that the death penalty costs North Carolina $2.16 million more per execution than a non-death-penalty murder case with a life sentence. If Ohio applies that figure to its current death row population, capital punishment costs would be in the $330 million range above the cost of an alternative of life without parole.
For the 10 years that New York had a functioning death penalty, it is estimated that the state spent $200 million.
Additional studies in Indiana, Florida, California, Kansas, Tennessee, New Jersey, Texas and elsewhere have all reached similar conclusions.
A study at Dartmouth College found that the costs of the death penalty are borne primarily by increasing taxes and decreasing expenditures, such as police and highway funding, with county budgets bearing the brunt of the burden.
Between 1982 and 1997, the extra cost of capital trials was $1.6 billion nationally.