Re: Should we give convicted felons right to choose death?
Posted: Fri Apr 17, 2015 10:35 pm
glockgirl wrote:Nope. They are sentenced to life without the possibility of parole, saves the taxpayers money (no, seriously, look it up) and gives them them no easy escape--only the prospect of waking up every single day to the same nightmare.
This is a misnomer. The studies that draw that conclusion fail to account for def attorney fees.
When the death penalty is involved, def attorneys raise their rates considerably. This greatly thows off the numbers.
Those studies also fail to account for the fact that they are working with average numbers.
If you survey 5 things vs 50 things...the 50 will almost always come in lower.
The link below contains a NV study....
Death pen...1 to 1.3 million
Non death...775K
Header reads death pen costs up to twice as much.
Stats like that should automatically raise a red flag. They are rounding up....what else did they round up?
Did they always round up, or were they only rounding on the death side?
With that in mind here are some actual studies.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty
Also, saying something is cheaper than something else...means that any case that meets that criteria is "proof"...and anything that is questioned is an "exception to the rule"
This is a classic CJ argument topic...you have to make sure all numbers are calculated and reported accurately.
The state doesn't pay def attorney fees on convictions...so counting those fees towards the total is inaccurate.
Cases should only be compared that have similar prosecution hours used.
When you do that you will find that incarceration is actually higher then death.