WHAT’S THE POINT?
For the two of you who don’t know it, Scott Peterson was convicted of first-and second-degree murder on Friday for the deaths of his wife and son. Next he’ll be sentenced, when the jury will have the opportunity to decide his fate. Because he is convicted of a crime with special circumstances, he is eligible for the death penalty. There are many who believe he should and will, get the death penalty.
The death penalty is one of those “third rails” of political discourse. It is the super hot source of voter electricity that will make or break a politician’s campaign, and can turn polite dinner parties into brawls.
It reaches into the very heart of who we are, and how we see the world. It is an emotional argument that frequently is devoid of logic. For example, a logical person would assume that a forgiving person, a religious type, say George W. Bush, obviously would be against the death penalty. They’d be wrong.
Then again, if you believed that a law and order type, say a Supreme Court Justice like Ruth Bader Ginsburg would be avidly pro the death penalty. You’d also be wrong.
“People who are well represented at trial do not get the death penalty... I have yet to see a death case among the dozens coming to the Supreme Court on eve-of-execution stay applications in which the defendant was well represented at trial,” said Bader Ginsburg in an Associated Press article on April 10, 2001.
The price of housing an inmate is astronomical. The average cost of housing a prisoner in 2004, as published by the Department of Corrections, is $30,929 per year. Currently there are approximately 163,500 prisoners incarcerated. Of those, 635 are on death row. In the 28 years since the death penalty was re-instituted, California has executed 10 people. It seems to me that we are spending millions of dollars to defend an idea that we do not need. The death penalty has not been proven to be a cost effective way to diminish murders. All you need to do is listen to a week’s worth of the news to understand that murders continue to happen and they are no longer shocking.
I am a law and order kind of guy. I like my city clean and my streets free of crime. And I am subject to the same flights of emotional anger that others are. Frankly, on a personal level I believe in the death penalty. I believe that people who are decidedly evil should be put out of our misery. If you hurt my family I would most definitely desire revenge in the harshest of terms and manner. Especially if you hurt my dog.
There are crimes, that in my opinion, merit the death penalty. That being said, I still advocate an abolition of the death penalty, not because it’s morally wrong, though a strong case can be made for that position. Nor should it be abolished because we are killing people to prove that killing people is wrong. Nor should we abolish the death penalty because the average prisoner reads at the seventh grade level.
We should abolish it because it costs too much. It costs the state almost three times as much to prosecute a death penalty case versus a “regular” murder. Los Angeles County spends an average $2,000,000 per death penalty case versus $600,000 for a murder without the death penalty, according to the Web site, death-penalty.org.
In LA County, investigation costs are nine times more for the defense and the prosecution to try someone on a death penalty case than elsewhere. That means a normal murder which costs on average $5,000 to investigate, costs $45,000 to investigate, according to the Web site. Both sides spend that much.
And this is just the beginning. Because there are constitutional safeguards that must be followed — like appeals — which require attorneys to participate in. There is the housing of a death row inmate, which is a far greater cost than for the average prisoner. These prisoners require a higher staffing rate, and that means increased employee costs, which the taxpayer must absorb.
In a society that is running a huge deficit, I do not believe we have the fiscal liberty of the death penalty. It doesn’t make financial sense. We don’t really enforce it, and we don’t really need it. If we only use it on average once every two years, why have it?
I understand that we are a law and order society. Two weeks ago we passed a proposition to increase the collection of DNA, in an effort to improve our crime solving ability. But I’m pretty sure most people did not understand the finer points of what that proposition was about.
I also understand that the death penalty is one of those items that most people are unable to think rationally about. People have a very dogmatic response to the topic. That leads to politicians who have a dogmatic response and then they are unable to look at the problem on more than the single level of, “Will it get me votes?”
The problem with this lack of ability is that it leads to bad legislation, and politically expedient speeches. It is this type of one note politicking that is a step away from a mob mentality. And a mob mentality is a step away from a murderous one, and that is what we are trying to prevent.
Scott Peterson will likely be given the death penalty. He knows that he has a minuscule chance of ever being executed in the state of California. Frankly I’d like to see us just lock him up, throw away the key and spend the extra millions it will save on something important.
Perhaps some books, or teachers, or arts programs. (David Pisarra is a business development lawyer in the Santa Monica firm of Pisarra & Grist. He welcomes your questions and comments. He or (310) 664-9969).
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on November 16, 2004. Read the original PDF.