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Arizona can execute Danny Lee Jones, 6-3 Supreme Court rules
(www.courthousenews.com)
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this post was submitted on 31 May 2024
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Isn't the reason it costs more to keep someone on death row largely due to the appeals they get?
I'd much rather we spend more making sure we aren't destroying the lives of innocent people than save money by not giving them as many chances to get an unjust sentence overturned. Which isn't necessarily a pro-death penalty position, as it could also be a call to reform the appeals process for everyone else.
So the argument is, it costs so much to maintain the filter that tries to keep innocent people from being executed, so let's make it cheaper by removing some of that filter.
It costs more to execute somebody than keep them in prison forever in order to make as sure as we can that a person is guilty before executing them, by allowing more appeals.
Suggesting the solution to that is fewer appeals is directly saying that it is better to kill more innocent people at a lower cost than it is to not kill anyone.
Also, that it's worth killing innocent people as long as bad people die. Not to prevent them from committing further harm, but just to kill them.
I'm struggling to see the benefit in that cost/benefit analysis. It's not about protecting people (because it actively kills innocent people), it's about killing people just to kill bad people.
Edit: I misunderstood what you were saying. But I would also say that while it would be great to improve the system for the initial trial, removing appeals would have the opposite effect and wouldn't help the initial trial at all. However, if the initial trials are better, everything would still be cheaper regardless of the appeals because there'd be less people falsely imprisoned on death row.
To be clear, I was just pointing out that the savings aren't coming from eliminating the death penalty, they are coming from reducing the number of appeals, and therefore increasing the likelihood that an innocent person will spend the rest of their life in prison, which is a bad thing. I'm not advocating for or against the death penalty, but I do think that a life sentence should come with just as many safeguards as a death sentence. The fact that you could release someone who was wrongfully convicted only matters if you actually allow those mistakes to be corrected.
We could use improvements at every part of the process. The appeals process however can be particularly awful, and is full of arbitrary restrictions and limitations that have little effect other than making it harder to correct mistakes and injustices. Some of them were put in place for no reason other than because politicians wanted to look tough on crime, and apparently overturning convictions looks bad for the justice system's track record. But really I was only bringing it up because it's relevant to the cost argument.