On the first day of the legislative session, Gov. Susana Martinez told a packed House chamber that she will work to reinstate the death penalty.
It is my opinion that going back to this failed public policy is a costly step backward that will do nothing to reduce our murder rate while sending innocent people to their deaths.
Cost of death
Bringing back the death penalty will cost our cash-strapped state incredible sums of money. Those costs are up-front, not a little at a time as with life sentences.
Because of a 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision (Gregg v. Georgia), capital cases are considerably more burdensome and expensive to try than life imprisonment cases. Typically, a death penalty case takes a year just to get to trial. Pre-trial preparations take longer (read, “hours billed”). There will be more motions made and experts hired. Jury selection takes longer. There will also be twice as many and higher-paid attorneys for both sides. The trials themselves also take longer.
Add to this entire costly burden the fact that death penalty trials are really two trials.
The first determines guilt, and the second metes out punishment. But most of the punishment trials result in life sentences, so at the end of a costly trial, there is a costly life sentence, too. From a fiscally conservative position, it makes more sense to just go the life-sentence route.
Innocents convicted
Since 1973, 138 death row inmates have been exonerated — four in New Mexico — despite a criminal justice system’s aversion to fund DNA testing, reinvestigations or re-trials. Sixty-eight percent of murder convictions are overturned on appeal.
Many former death penalty prosecutors say that threat of death is used as a coercive tool to get guilty pleas for capital crimes, leading to false life-sentence convictions.
In 2000, Illinois Republican Gov. George Ryan, a long-time death penalty supporter, found the rate of wrongful convictions so disturbing that he put a moratorium on executions. The Illinois Legislature is looking at abolishing the death penalty altogether.
The color card
It’s a disturbing truism that minorities are convicted out of proportion to their numbers. For instance, African-Americans are four times as likely to be given the death penalty as Anglos who committed the same crime.
In 2003, 80 percent of Colorado death row inmates were people of color. Nationally, 55 percent of inmates awaiting execution are minorities.
Ninety-seven percent of prosecutors in capital cases are white. They often use jury selection (voir dire) to eliminate minority jurors. The “Texas shuffle” is a common practice to limit or eliminate African-American jurors when the accused is black.
But the real race card is the color of the victim. Those accused of killing a white person are nine times more likely to be charged with the death penalty than those accused of killing a black person.
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Clearly, the death penalty is dealt with an uneven hand.
Not a deterrent
Most murders are crimes of passion. The person committing the crime is reacting with the primitive reptilian portion of the brain and not thinking rationally. In other words, murderers aren’t considering whether they’re in Arizona or New Mexico when they’re killing.
A 2008 study on murder rates by the state showed a significant gap between death penalty and non-death penalty states. States without the death penalty had lower murder rates. Murder rates have been trending downward since 1990, but the downward trend is significantly greater in non-death penalty states.
Even neighboring states show this trend.
For example, North Dakota and Connecticut both have a death penalty, yet their respective neighbors South Dakota and Massachusetts, which do not, have lower murder rates. West Virginia’s murder rate is 30 percent below Virginia’s, which has one of the highest execution rates in the county.
Clearly, these trends show that the death penalty does not deter potential murderers.
A pragmatic national downward trend
Cost is the main reason many states are re-evaluating how they address violent crimes.
Conservative states Montana and Kansas are both on the brink of joining the 15 states without the death penalty. Alaska, that bastion of conservatism that brought us Sarah Palin, does not have a death penalty.
Even in states that have a death penalty, the trend is to use it less. Illinois has a death penalty, but has had a moratorium on executions since 2000.
It’s clear to me that the death penalty is a costly, ineffective method to deter violent crimes. Death penalty cases have low conviction rates compared to life cases, tend to convict minorities and do not allow for the opportunity to fix inevitable wrongful convictions after sentences are carried out.
