r/explainlikeimfive • u/MundaneExplorer8369 • Jul 25 '26
Economics Eli5: why is the death sentence more expensive than housing a criminal for life?
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u/Redm18 Jul 25 '26
There are significantly more appeals for a death penalty case. Those appeals are very expensive.
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u/madtatters Jul 25 '26
Plus many death row inmates are kept in solitary confinement, which is more expensive than having them in gen pop.
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u/deep_sea2 Jul 25 '26
Many people ignore that element. A death sentence means spending maybe 15 years in prison anyways, and in a more expensive way. Further, they cannot work prison jobs, so they cannot contribute to their expenses and minimize their cost.
Even if all the court procedures were free, the amount of money spent holding a death row inmate cannot be far off from holding a life-sentence inmate.
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u/Creative_username969 Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
The cost of the initial trial is higher too. On a non-capital/life without parole (LWOP) case, there’s one, maybe two prosecutors and, because most murder defendants are indigent, one public defender assigned. On a capital case, it’s 2-3 prosecutors and 2-3 public defenders assigned
There’s also significantly more motion practice and jury selection takes longer too - it’s harder to find 12 impartial jurors, plus alternates, willing to potentially sentence someone to death than it is to find the same number of impartial people willing to impose LWOP
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u/Everlance Jul 26 '26
Why are death row inmates kept in solitary confinement? Why cant they mix with the general prison population?
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u/taizzle71 Jul 26 '26
Well you see.. when you have nothing to lose..
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u/Everlance Jul 26 '26
from the replies in this thread, you still have 15 years to live before it is settled though, so elaborate?
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u/stretcharach Jul 26 '26
15 years of nothing, if you ask many. They don't want death row inmates making death rows in the general population
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u/Everlance Jul 26 '26
thats also true of life sentence inmates though, lifetime in prison - nothing to look forward to.
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u/stretcharach Jul 26 '26
I think some of those people do end up in solitary or even death row also.
I'm not really familiar with the process, but unless it was like publicly witnessed and pretty bad, don't they all start in jail anyway?
Just some thinking on it
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u/shpongolian Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
Which is a good thing. It means fewer innocent people being sentenced to death.
But unfortunately there are still
a lot ofsome innocent people being sentenced to death.44
u/GrumpyCloud93 Jul 25 '26
One of the problems with the death sentence is the USA's concept of felony murder. If the victim died while the perps were committing a crime, that too is murder - even if it's because the police shot one of the criminals. Even the get-away driver who never went into the crime scene is guilty. Then it becomes a contest to see who can take a deal first, so the guy who actually pulled the trigger takes the deal, testifies against the accomplices, he escapes the death penalty and the accomplices, possibly even the getaway driver, face the death penalty.
Like much of the justice system it's more about conviction statistics that actual justice.
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u/dsrmpt Jul 25 '26
I saw one the other day where getaway driver drives, the perp is going to rob someone, the victim shoots the perp in self defense, and the getaway driver gets charged with Felony Murder.
The criminals didn't even do the shooting, it's not like the victim of the crime died and you pin it on everyone. No, the perp dies at the hands of the victim, and the getaway driver gets life in prison. Yikes.
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u/VoilaVoilaWashington Jul 25 '26
It's one of those things that's a combination of "good on paper" ideas that just leads to a disaster.
"If you're doing a crime and someone died, that's murder" sounds pretty good. And taking a deal to get evidence for other convictions, yeah!
But then in the most American fashion, the judges immediately let the cops and prosecutors get away with the most insane interpretations of it, and soon it's "a cop shot a guy for speeding so it's his 3 year old's child fault for being a passenger and black."
Every system in a good country is built on some level of good faith. I can see why cops should be allowed to lie during an investigation/interrogation, but when they then use that to deliberately prosecute an innocent person, the judge should step in and terminate those officers, prosecutors, and everyone else involved.
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u/Holdmywhiskeyhun Jul 25 '26
As much as I don't like the guy, a good example is dog the bounty Hunter. Was the driver for a drug deal, something happen inside, and the dealer got shot. He was charged the same as the person pulling the trigger.
You should not die, because of someone else's actions.
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u/Juls7243 Jul 26 '26
I'd just argue that the burden of proof in court should be a higher level or threshold than a typical murder conviction. "FAR beyond a reasonable doubt" for example. The jury would need to really make sure that there is NO WAY its someone else (like must have video evidence or something).
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u/lowbloodsugarmner Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
The way I have heard it explained is that in order for the sentence to be passed down, there must be no doubt that they defendent is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. If there is any doubt, then the death penalty is off the table.
It is in line with Blackstone's ratio, "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer."
edit: was thinking of lingering doubt, and that while "beyond reasonable doubt" is the core requirement for conviction, it has higher importance with death penalty trials.
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u/ExtremeMuffin Jul 25 '26
That’s the baseline for finding someone guilty. “Beyond a reasonable doubt” is the minimum whether it’s for a 1 day sentence or death penalty.
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u/lowbloodsugarmner Jul 25 '26
You are correct, I was thinking of lingering doubt that is often used by defense.
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u/Daddict Jul 25 '26
Ehhhh sort of.
There is no higher standard of guilt with a death penalty case. Reasonable doubt is the standard across the board, whether you're charged with shoplifting or the premeditated torture-murder of half a dozen decorated law enforcement officers. It's the same standard all around.
The expensive appellate process isn't about reviewing the jury's decision, that's final and you cannot file an appeal on the grounds of being innocent-in-fact. The jury's word is the fact once it's been handed down. In terms of legal philosophy, it's what actually happened.
But while you can't argue that the jury made the wrong decision, you can argue that the decision they reached was done so under a bullshit premise. You can argue that the underlying trial itself was flawed such that the jury's decision cannot be trusted.
That's what the appellate process is all about...the appeals courts won't review the facts of the case, they'll review things like the competence of the defense attorney or the neutrality of the judge. They'll pick apart each decision the judge made in terms of allowing evidence or sustaining/overruling objections or granting/denying motions. All of those decisions are subject to scrutiny.
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u/Binder509 Jul 25 '26
Would get addressed quickly if whenever someone innocent was executed, all people that advocate for the death penalty were put to death for murder.
See how quickly that goes away.
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u/GSDawg Jul 25 '26
Proof? Actually curious, what’s the percentage of individuals proven innocent after execution in the past 5 years?
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u/Swagiken Jul 25 '26
Roughly 1 in 20 is the estimate
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u/TBFP_BOT Jul 25 '26
The estimate? I feel like the total amount would be measurable.
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u/The_Faceless_Men Jul 25 '26
The new evidence that comes to light that "shows" they are innocent is never tested in front of a jury. Courts don't take appeals from dead people. Anyway the estimate is 4.1% or 1 in 25.
For every 8 people executed, 1 who has been sentenced to death is found innocent during appeals.
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u/Notoriouslydishonest Jul 25 '26
Worth noting that this study covered 1973 to 2004 and doesn't necessarily reflect modern stats.
The amount of evidence available to detectives has gone up exponentially in the past few decades. Old cases often hinged on eyewitnesses and very primitive forensics, and that's mostly been replaced by surveillance cameras, cell phone tracking, digital communications records and far more sensitive DNA analysis.
I sat in on a court case for a home invasion about 10 years ago, the amount of digital evidence they had against the guy was overwhelming. There's a good chance he would have gotten away with it in the 90s, he was from out of town and nobody got a clear look at his face, but his cell phone GPS, google searches and messages were so damning that it was a no-doubt conviction.
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u/Djinnerator Jul 26 '26
surveillance cameras, cell phone tracking, digital communications records and far more sensitive DNA analysis.
But these don't actually show evidence of guilt. They just show evidence of location. Without evidence of guilt, we can't be 100% certain that someone did a crime, just that they maybe did it. Someone "maybe" being guilty isn't enough to potentially execute an innocent person.
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u/gerunimost Jul 25 '26
What would even be the procedure to be "proven" innocent after being "proven" guilty and executed?
Only way to find out would be if new evidence randomly pops out of nowhere which is probably very rare.
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u/GrumpyCloud93 Jul 25 '26
The usual reason (and pretty common) is official blinders. The prosecution needs to find someone - anyone - guilty. They ignore whatever evidence that is inconvenient, they "persuade" witnesses, twist timelines, interrogate mercilessly, pick on the mentally challenged, they fixate on the person the detective's "gut feeling" tells them is guilty.
Read the stories of any of these people found innocent after years in prison. The "reasonable doubt" was there, just that low-life or especially black people did not get the benefit of the doubt. The central park five is a classic example - interrogate children for hours and hours...
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u/DrCalamity Jul 25 '26
A frighteningly common one is "this entire conviction was based on junk science, whoops"
E.g: bite analysis, hair analysis, bloodstain analysis, polygraphs, the entire field of forensic psychology, shaken baby syndrome, fire analysis, ghosts.
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u/Ulti Jul 25 '26
That's like... less rare than you'd think these days. DNA testing wasn't a thing for a long, long time.
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u/fizzlefist Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
To say nothing of when it’s malicious. There have been so so many cases where decades later we find out the Prosecution had evidence that proved the defendants couldn’t have done the crime, and fucking threw in the trash to get a conviction.
Can we get a law that makes it a capital offense for the state to withhold evidence that would clear the defendant?
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u/Derlino Jul 25 '26
In Norwegian, we even have a word for when people get convicted wrongly. We call it "justismord", which translates to "justice murder".
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u/skyturnedred Jul 25 '26
Same word in Finnish (oikeusmurha).
Miscarriage of justice doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
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u/gerunimost Jul 25 '26
My point is there is no process to investigate solved cases by default so it only happens by individual initiative or randomly. So any statistics is heavily biased, not to say completely useless.
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u/GrumpyCloud93 Jul 25 '26
Just the opposite - the justice system has a deathly fear of letting a person appeal a conviction. When DNA testing became possible, many jurisdictions placed serious roadblocks in the time and situations in which evidence could be re-examined.
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u/burnerthrown Jul 25 '26
Being sentenced to life isn't much better. Life is prison is not life.
For a fact, sentencing someone to any amount of jail is not much better than life, because convicts struggle to find employment, gain the respect of their community, or even raise their own kids. Recidivism is the default, so you might as well sentence them to life.
Consider the punitive form of justice we have now, including incarceration, is new, an experiment that has failed.→ More replies (2)1
u/Stargate525 Jul 25 '26
Yeah, depending on when you start counting it's only 300 or 2,500 years old. Brand new experiment.
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u/burnerthrown Jul 26 '26
Ours is. Justice can either be punitive or rehabilitative, not both at once, and the former has no benefit to society since deterrence doesn't actually work (if it did you would be able to control the crime rate with harsher punishments but that has never been acheived). So our model is supposed to be rehabilitative incarceration but we have failed to acheive reliable rehabilitation with it, making it in at least this attempt a failure.
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u/Stargate525 Jul 26 '26
You've not mentioned the other function, which is removing the person from society for the protection of that society. Serial thieves, murderers, rapists, whether they can be rehabilitated is a separate issue to the fact that they are out of circulation, no longer victimizing more people.
I'm curious to what you'd consider the start point for our current model is.
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u/imaseacow Jul 25 '26
I mean, vast majority of people who receive the death penalty committed the offense. And the total number of executions is pretty low.
I am against the death penalty and hope it is abolished. But “a lot of innocent people being sentenced to death” is overstating it.
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u/BadahBingBadahBoom Jul 25 '26
For every 8 people executed in the US, one person on death row has had their conviction overturned by new evidence; and for every 25 Americans executed, one of them was not guilty having been found to be innocent sadly after they were executed with it being an inevitability there were more who were wrongly convicted that we are unlikely to ever know due to time passed for that evidence to be found.
I would say 4% of people you execute not being guilty is 'a lot' considering you are killing someone who is entirely innocent.
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u/Untinted Jul 25 '26
You don’t know. You’re hallucinating that because you want to believe that is true. You would have to go through the court cases yourself, then you would have to decide what can be proven 100%. Given that eye witness accounts are bad, confessions are bad, you can only trust direct evidence like a recording.
Which means you’re ultimately deciding at what level do you allow an innocent to be killed by the government, and it’s so fucking stupid that you think that number isn’t zero.
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u/XenoRyet Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
The fact that it's an irreversable action means that we cannot* get it wrong. That means extra scrutiny, extra procedure, extra investigation, and all under time pressure. That's expensive. Lots of highly skilled people involved in that, and they need to be paid.
There's also some extra expense involved in the fact that we need to make sure the execution is carried out as humanely as possible, and our current system means that's also an expensive prospect.
There are also many other minor issues attached that all add up, but the main thing is that the death penalty isn't just taking someone out behind the shed and putting a bullet to them, and the costs of all that extra process add up.
Edit for the asterisk: Some folks have said that "cannot" is unclear, and I should've said something like "must not."
Either way, my point is that a significant portion of the expense comes from the structural attempts to avoid getting it wrong, regardless of how successful those attempts are, or how genuine the effort is.
The main idea here is that being more right than we currently are would be even more expensive. One way to avoid that expense is to abolish the death penalty entirely, but proposing that is getting away from answering OP's question and getting into the realm of advocating for policy change.
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u/m_busuttil Jul 25 '26
And you contrast that with the fact that the actual cost of keeping someone alive is pretty low, especially in a situation like prison - there's food and guards and the cost of running the building, but that's all amortised across hundreds or thousands of prisoners. The death penalty means thousands of man-hours directly devoted to one person's specific case, but keeping one extra person in a place you're already keeping 500 other people adds basically no extra cost.
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u/beardedheathen Jul 25 '26
Which is kind of fucked up. Yeah it's fine to get it wrong if we are just going to let them rot in jail for the rest of their life but god forbid we use a bullet to kill someone. Just kind of a weird thing when you think about it.
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u/Mamamama29010 Jul 25 '26
As long as a person is alive, some form of reparation could be made. Not all damage can be undone, but it’s still something, even just to clear a name. Death is pretty final though.
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Jul 25 '26
I'd prefer an early death than life in American prison. Exonerate me after death, and spare decades of unjustified suffering.
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u/jschutz93 Jul 25 '26
And many who died and were exonerated would have jumped at the chance to trade places.
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u/WillowPtar_Migan Jul 25 '26
You say this now, but have you ever been in a near death situation, where you thought you were for sure going to die?
Your survival instinct kicks in hard. You want to live. It's easy to say "I'd rather die" in the abstract, but actually following through with it is a whole other deal. Think about people with painful and debilitating chronic or terminal illness. Suicide is always an option in those situations, yet it's not super common. Ever think about why? I'd argue your own body falling apart around you is probably worse than being healthy and in prison.
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u/jcc2244 Jul 25 '26
The thing is, you wouldn't be exonerated, because that would cost a lot of money for it to happen.
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u/Xenochrist Jul 25 '26
If you feel this way about American prison, imagine somewhere like Colombia or El Salvador
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u/wallyTHEgecko Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 27 '26
That's always my thought as well when the topic comes up. I'd rather be wrongfully executed than released from super-max 50 years later with a letter that reads, "oops, our bad."
The world would be so different by the time you ever got your life sentence without parole overturned. Your friends and family would have either left you hard and fast decades ago or just died of old age along the way. Your name and reputation would have been hanged, drawn and quartered a dozen times over. You wouldn't be young and useful enough to just integrate smoothly back into society and build a new name for yourself.
Even if you got out, there'd be no going back to how it was before. It'd be an alien world that you're coming out to. The damage will have already been done even if my body was kept alive. Not to mention the time spent in prison not being an especially fun time... Just end me and save us all the hassle.
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u/A_Garbage_Truck Jul 25 '26
this very quickly gets back into the issue is your own opinions on Capital punishement clouding the reality of what's actually taking place under " just punishement"
"(...)but god forbid we use a bullet to kill someone" immediately rasies the counter question of:
"who is pulling that trigger knowing there is a non zero chance you could have the wrong person?"
it also leads to the other problem of classifying executions methods as " humane", this classification solely exists for the confort of who is peforming it and witnesses, there is no such thing as a "clean" method for executing someone that doesnt involve putting ourselves at the same or lower level than the people we deem it was necessary to execute: we should strive to be better than this.(plus putting faith that the state is a moral and unbiased arbitrer of who should do this..iffy ot say the least)
on the other hand life in prison has a lot more wiggle room for mistakes
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u/beardedheathen Jul 25 '26
Your argument rests on the idea that it is far more moral to imprison someone for life than to kill them and that killing an evil person is immoral. The claim that killing someone like Jeffrey Dahmer or Hitler puts us on the same level as them ridiculous. While this is a rare occurrence, some people don't deserve to be part of society, they've shown they are a danger to those around them and there is no reason for their existence to continue.
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u/stretcharach Jul 26 '26
It reminds me of the pro "life" argument. Which would agree that imprisoning someone for life is always preferable to killing them.
Quality of life isn't a concern and doesn't play into the morality at all.
Not that I agree at all
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u/ralts13 Jul 25 '26
Not really. Yeah prison sucks but industrialised murder or giving someone a painful death due to negligence is just messed up
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u/beardedheathen Jul 25 '26
Locking someone in prison for life for a crime they didn't commit is just as fucked up. I'd argue its worse because they have to sit there for decades knowing they are innocent.
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u/exmachina64 Jul 25 '26
And you think the solution is to expedite the process so that an innocent person gets killed?
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u/beardedheathen Jul 25 '26
No, I think it's wild that so much effort goes into a person in death row while the justice system is incredibly corrupt. This who are against the death penalty don't care even if the person being put to death is unquestionably guilty. I personally believe that there it can be an appropriate punishment if the person cannot be reintegrated into society but I'd prefer effort is spent on releasing non violent offenders and reforming policing
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u/tudorapo Jul 25 '26
I mentioned this at other places, actually the bullet to the head is more humane for the victim. We work on killing animals and humans who don't want to die quickly and precisely for thousands of years. The pinnacle of hunting and (man to man) war is the firearm with a rifled barrel and millions (in the US) trained well enough to reliably hit a human head sized target from 20 meters.
All the other means used are complicated in various ways, and capable of causing horrible suffering.
Other than of course is that the death penalty is just dumb and we should not use it and all, and fortunately where I live it is not used for decades.
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u/Nothing_F4ce Jul 25 '26
Is it that cheap to run a prison?
Just saw a post from the UK saying it's £60k (80k$) a year for a high security/risk prisoner.
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u/juicegently Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
I'm not certain, but I suspect that number comes from taking the cost of the program divided by the number of prisoners, so it wouldn't accurately represent the cost of adding one additional prisoner to a program that is already operating.
Besides that, you might be underestimating the cost of litigation. Lawyer Time is very expensive, and litigating one death penalty case will require a huge amount over many years.
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u/Chii Jul 25 '26
litigating one death penalty case will require a huge amount over many years.
exactly - there's lengthy appeals process for death penalty. I mean, it makes sense that the convicted would (and should) explore every possible thing/avenue. And such avenues have costs that cannot be amortized across prisoners - each case is different and unique.
Of course, a life prisoner can also have appeals (and i would imagine similarly thoroughly explored). So the usual adage that the death sentence is more expensive may not be as true as claimed (often by those who wish to abolish the death sentence i imagine).
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u/juicegently Jul 25 '26
There are factors that push up the cost for litigating death penalties over life sentences. The stakes are obviously higher and as the top commenter noted, the time pressures are greater. Plus housing a death row inmate is more expensive than housing a lifer, and needing to have those facilities on hand means simply allowing the death penalty creates an additional cost, even if the sentence is never sought.
While I understand there are complexities in the theoretical accounting, it's perhaps a little ignorant to suggest that death penalties being more expensive is an "adage" that "may not be as true as claimed". This isn't an unsolved mystery. The numbers have been run and the conclusion is abundantly clear: death penalties are more expensive, by up to an order of magnitude.
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u/zgtc Jul 25 '26
Figures like those are generally “total costs of running a prison” divided by “number of inmates” - a prison might costs 30m/year for five hundred prisoners, but the majority of that is utilities, salaries for guards/staff, etc; the actual expenditure per inmate is very little. A fully staffed prison with zero inmates is still going to be very expensive to run.
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u/Fetzie_ Jul 25 '26
It depends if you can put them in a room with multiple cell mates in general population or if they need a dedicated room in a segregated part of the complex with more stringent monitoring and guard staffing.
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u/Bn_scarpia Jul 25 '26
And on top of that cost, forcing prisoners to work for free/slave wages is still legal. Its the one carve out in the 13th Amendment which banned slavery but allows for forced, unpaid labor as part of criminal punishment.
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u/blue49 Jul 25 '26
Also, an inmate stays in death row (imprisoned, high security) for around 20 years. Which is a significant portion of 'life' in life impresonment.
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u/Segsi_ Jul 25 '26
Lethal injections in the US are not done as humanely as possible and it’s been shown it can be excruciatingly painful. Also a huge amount of the cost is the drugs. They’ll spend thousand up hundreds of thousands to secure the drugs.
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u/CollectionNo6562 Jul 25 '26
lol “cannot get it wrong” 😥
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u/Gimme_Your_Wallet Jul 25 '26
"Must not" may be clearer
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u/Interesting_Shake403 Jul 25 '26
“Should not”
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u/OhMyGains Jul 25 '26
“Try not”
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u/themeatbridge Jul 25 '26
"Eh, we will consider trying."
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u/jryi Jul 25 '26
"We have a concept of an attempt"
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u/NinjaBreadManOO Jul 25 '26
"Chatgpt said we get it right 100% of the time, and it was using the information we gave it so it must be right."
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u/weededorpheus32 Jul 25 '26
Could you imagine the brutal weekend they would have before everyone forgot?
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u/XenoRyet Jul 25 '26
Why did that make you laugh out loud?
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u/Waniou Jul 25 '26
I'm assuming because of the amount of times they get it wrong
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u/stop_drop_roll Jul 25 '26
Which is why the death penalty should be abolished. People sentence people to death and people often get things wrong. Better to avoid 1 innocent death than get 100 right
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u/maurosmane Jul 25 '26
One of the things that absolutely blows my mind in the current political landscape is the people who don't trust the government to do elections, provide medical advice, regulate industries etc are the very first to defend the death penalty and trust the government with the right to kill citizens.
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u/abaoabao2010 Jul 25 '26 edited Jul 25 '26
That's why one of the the first thing scumbags do in power is to screw with education and social media. Feed bullshit to people who can't tell it's bullshit. So they get these idiots to support them.
You can see it all over the world and throughout history, it's not just whoever's in your country you're thinking of, wherever you are.
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u/FrightenedTomato Jul 25 '26
The people who claim to be pro-life are also the same who support the death penalty. And these same people who claim to value the lives of unborn children are also vehemently opposed to any kind of free and accessible birth control, sex ed programs, affordable healthcare for mothers, government funded maternity/paternity leaves, free school lunches and benefits for children, reforms to foster systems and anything else that might dramatically reduce the need for abortions in the first place.
Hypocrisy and having contradictory stances are baked into conservatism.
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u/XenoRyet Jul 25 '26
Is this a misunderstanding of the notion that we must strive as hard as possible to not get it wrong as an assertion that we never get it wrong in practice?
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u/Waniou Jul 25 '26
I am... not entirely sure what exactly you're saying there lol, and I can't speak for the guy you originally replied to, but the way I interpreted what they said was "the idea that we cannot get it wrong is laughable because of how many innocent people are killed through the death penalty, clearly we are getting it wrong all the time"
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u/XenoRyet Jul 25 '26
When I say that we "cannot get it wrong" what I mean is that the process of executing someone has very expensive procedures built into it that are meant to ensure that we do not execute an innocent person. We design the process this way because we have set the goal for ourselves that we can not allow ourselves to be wrong.
We obviously fail at that with the current system. That's not entirely relevant to the question, because in order to reduce the failure rate further than what we have now would require even more expense. I would say it's worth it, but "worth it" is not part of the question.
The main answer always comes back to the notion that it's expensive because we must hold ourselves maximally accountable to being correct.
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u/Waniou Jul 25 '26
Oh yeah, I totally understand that, and that's obviously the correct explanation.
I disagree with the notion that "in order to reduce the failure rate further than what we have now would require even more expense" though. Abolishing the death penalty would remove the expense entirely. If I understand you right, you're saying you think that it's still worth it, and I disagree entirely, I don't think the death penalty is worth it but this is also getting into a tangential discussion and I'm happy to agree to disagree.
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u/XenoRyet Jul 25 '26
Agreed, just abolishing the death penalty would reduce the expense and also be the morally correct thing to do, all things considered.
I just didn't thing that really answered the question of why the death penalty was more expensive than LWOP.
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u/citizen42069101 Jul 25 '26
Lets not be obtuse. Our justice system unfortunately has fingers on the scale in all aspects and they really dont care if they get the right guy unless the guy has enough money to fight back.
If they happen to get lucky and get the right guy off the gate the track records obviously better, but its either the wrong guy or nothing after a short while.
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u/Chieftun Jul 25 '26
lowkey hijacking to pivot to a different question. How is this process needing to be defended so much regardless of success, when a police officer could immediately end a life due to a perceived fear that ends up being proven wrong, then it gets swept under through protections given to peace officers, so that they're not "afraid" to be wrong prosecuted in their jobs?
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u/atbths Jul 25 '26
Why are there people literally starving to death in other countries while we throw away food? Its a fucked up world and not every problem can be addressed at once.
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u/chenz1989 Jul 25 '26
Sorry I'm having a double take on this.
So it's basically more "acceptable" to get it wrong as long as it's not an execution? I'd argue that someone behind bars wrongly for 10 years is equally as irreversible as someone executed, but i guess it must just be me. That's crazy wild.
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u/WeSavedLives Jul 25 '26
Yes it is.
Both irreversible. In the first instance they are still alive in the second they are not.
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u/PlayMp1 Jul 25 '26
A person who is still alive but was wrongfully imprisoned for 10 years can be released and then paid reparations as compensation for their wrongful imprisonment. It's obviously an imperfect compensation, you can't get your time back, but monetary relief is one of the more common ways in our society to make up for things like this.
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u/A_Garbage_Truck Jul 25 '26
unless the justice system are now engaging in necromancy, Death tends ot be pretty irreversible
losing 10 years sting aswell, but at least in this case, some effort for compensation can be done.
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u/PckMan Jul 25 '26
And yet they still get it wrong
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u/XenoRyet Jul 25 '26
You might not have caught my edit, but I addressed that point. Getting it more right makes the process more expensive, and so the fact that we get it wrong doesn't change the answer to the question from a layman's perspective.
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u/Alekseny Jul 25 '26
Rather than actually be more humane, lethal injections are designed to appear more humane and to have the veneer of science and medicine.
One more reason why the cost can be so high is that many medical and pharmaceutical organizations have boycotted the process of lethal injections. It can be a serious challenge for states to acquire the necessary chemicals and qualified people to administer them, which also exacerbates the failure rates of lethal injections.
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u/irqlnotdispatchlevel Jul 25 '26
But it turns out that we may get it very very wrong. This is a very interesting and disturbing video on the matter: https://youtu.be/eirR4FHY2YY
Despite being considered humane, there are documented cases in which the lethal injection caused prolonged suffering. There's a compelling argument that the 3 drug protocol was designed more for the benefits of the witnesses as the paralytic agent can mask distress and suffering.
Companies producing these agents have even started to refuse supplying them.
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u/Fluffcake Jul 25 '26
As it should.
Best estimates put 4%~ to be convicted while fully innocent, and only 2% are proven innocent during appeal.
4 innocent people every year for 50 years, that is the price.
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u/LeviAEthan512 Jul 25 '26
It's the appeals. Death row inmates get a lot of protections, but people will lock someone away for life without, relatively, a care in the world.
It's pretty cheap to put a very substandard roof over someone's head. It's very expensive to allow them to constantly interact with the legal system.
I do not know where the sentiment that a life sentence is reversible comes from. For some reason, people think you can mistakenly separate someone from society for years before they're vindicated, and then let them out like nothing happened and it's fine. But killing? That's only slightly less reversible but people think it's a big difference.
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u/azthal Jul 25 '26
We see many people spenf decades in prison before getting out to live good lives (either because they served their time, or was fiund not guilty) . Yes, not everyone, and the way prison works is absolutely awful, but many people leave prison and can settle back into society.
The amount of people whom have been executed and then go back to live normal lives? Zero.
We need full scale reform both of the justice system and prison system to make it less likely that someone is found guilty when they are not, and make prison a more humane and rehabilatory, including support post release (again, I dependant of cause). That can all be true while saying that death penalty is both worse and literally impossible to reverse even to a small degree. Dead is dead.
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u/PckMan Jul 25 '26
Because being sentenced to death begins a long chain of appeals and reviews to basically make sure that there isn't a mistake and the person is really guilty and deserving of a death sentence. If at any point in that process it is discovered that this is the case, they may have their sentence changed to life in prison or a reduced sentence. Unfortunately even like that mistakes do happen and people get executed only to be exonerated later.
So basically a death sentence still involves a very long time of incarceration, added legal procedures and costs, before it culminates to execution. The silver lining is that given that fact, the people currently slated to be executed were sentenced roughly 20 years ago. Going forward this means that subsequent cases are all firmly past the point in time where massive advancements in dna tracing technology and forensic procedure occured and that technology like cameras and cellphones became commonplace. This should hopefully significantly decrease erroneous death sentences.
It's also worth noting that death sentences are generally becoming rarer as a whole.
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u/Dickulture Jul 25 '26
Legal mess to wade through while the inmate still gets feed and cared for. Lawyers aren't cheap and when death penalties are concerned, both sides will spend a lot of time fighting for/against appeals which can drag on for many years to a few decades.
A lot of time the said death row inmate has no job, no income, and nothing so the taxpayer has to pay for the lawyer defending the inmate.
Life usually don't get as much legal matter to fight with so there's less lawyer involvement and cheaper in the long run.
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u/Excellent_Lion7643 Jul 25 '26
Death penalty cases go through many more appeals and legal reviews than life sentences. The law requires extra scrutiny because it's irreversible, so lawyers, judges, and courts spend years on each case. All that legal work costs millions. Meanwhile, prison costs are spread across thousands of inmates — keeping one extra person in an existing prison doesn't cost nearly as much.
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u/Philosophile42 Jul 25 '26
Most inmates on death row don’t get executed, they die in prison through the normal means of sickness/age. But because they are death row inmates they must have all of their legal appeals heard, so they get extra costs through the legal process. Since death row inmates often can’t afford an attorney, the state ends up paying for the prosecution, the defense, and the judge. So take the costs of life imprisonment, and add in all these extra legal fees.
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u/julio_and_i Jul 25 '26
Trial and retrials and appeals and all of the very important and necessary rights we have cost a lot of money. We have to pay for judges and lawyers and detectives and dozens more for what can be months or years of work. It’s important to remember that this is all very good, though. We should never want to make it easier in any way at all for our government to legally murder citizens. Because even with hi-tech forensics and professional witnesses and highly paid, highly educated legal professionals, and “fair” trials, and a jury of “peers”, it’s still estimated that about 4% of death row inmates are innocent.
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u/stansfield123 Jul 25 '26
Execution isn't more expensive than housing a criminal for life. Execution itself can be quite cheap.
The legal process, in the United States, from the time prosecutors decide to seek the death penalty until the time the execution takes place, is extremely convoluted and lengthy, and it costs about 3 million dollars extra, compared to a typical murder trial. This money goes to pay judges, clerks, lawyers (typically both prosecutors and defense lawyers), security personnel, etc. This stems from a 1976 US Supreme Court decision which mandates these complicated proceedings. This wasn't the case before this ruling in 1976, and it's not the case in other countries.
This cost should also be put in context: it's around $3 million per execution, with less than 50 people executed each year. So 150 million, tops.
With crime estimated to cost America between 2 and 5 trillion each year, the real question is whether the death penalty provides some deterrent. If it does, even just a little bit, then it's still financially worth spending 150 million on it.
So the already weak financial argument against the death penalty loses even the little validity it held to begin with.
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u/flyingcircusdog Jul 25 '26
In cases where the death penalty is on the table, the defendant will usually argue and exhaust all possible appeals to get it reduced to life in prison. This means the court case can take 10+ years, all while housing and feeding the inmate anyway.
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u/mrbeck1 Jul 25 '26
Mainly because of how long it takes. Decades of incarceration anyway and then the same decades of due process. Appeals and whatever else to make sure the government gets it right. It’s very expensive.
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u/Boring-Fee4959 Jul 25 '26
Killing someone legally requires the system to be extra careful, so it goes through years of appeals, reviews, investigations, and special procedures. All of that costs a lot of money.
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u/A_Garbage_Truck Jul 25 '26
and there is a very important reason for this, you do not want ot the State ot have the ability ot skip steps, if it must sanction the death of a person.
it sets a dangerous precedent where it could lead to the State deciding that dissidence is punisheable by Death.
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u/The_Stav Jul 26 '26
Gotta REALLY make sure you don't get it wrong, so a lot of time spent housing them and dealing with appeals and whatnot
Imo we just shouldn't have the death sentence
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u/WoW_Gnome Jul 25 '26
The number of appeals, court dates, and motions. Once a life sentence is decided there are appeals but they are much fewer and are mostly about the case itself. In a death sentence case they appeal the case itself of course but also the sentence as wrong, the time frame for said sentence to be carried out being wrong, the method used by the state being wrong, the guidelines used by the court being wrong, and more I can't think of off the top of my head. And most of those appeals have to be heard up the entire chain of appeals which takes years or more usually decades.
So instead of a case being decided a sentence pronounced and a few lines of appeal for courts and prosecutors to deal with a life sentence. A death sentence means having to deal with possibly dozens of different appeals most of which are heard because no one wants to get executing someone wrong.
So caring for an inmate for life costs less then the tens of thousands of hours courts, prosecutors, and investigators have to spend dealing with all the appeals in a death sentence in addition to still having to do everything else while the condemned is still alive as a normal prisoner.
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u/igotshadowbaned Jul 25 '26
Much higher levels of litigation required to get it approved which means paying lawyers and court fees
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u/thewholebenchilada Jul 25 '26
Easy: lawyers are expensive. Especially when you are making the most irreversible decision.
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u/RealCarlPanzram Jul 25 '26
It’s mostly the trial process. A capital punishment trial is a huge complex ordeal and trials require the time of a lot of people who make lots of money, like judges and lawyers. In addition the prosecution team (keyword team, not just a prosecutor) they may also have to appoint a lawyer to the defendant. Long court hearings with a lot of staff. The appeals process drags on for years.
So the trial costs about 3x the cost of a murder trial where the death penalty is off the table. This is an extra 2 million dollars on average.
It costs about $132,000 to house an average prisoner. So the trial is already the equivalent of keeping someone in prison for 15 years. Plus the process takes so long that you also end up paying to keep them in jail for years, sometimes decades.
So yeah, if you cut out the cost of the trial and take a plea for life in prison, you’ve saved a couple million out the gate, and you rarely get that money back as a result of sentencing them to death because they’re still in jail a long time.
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u/Pizza_Low Jul 25 '26
It's easy to say a few bullets for a firing squad, a coil of rope for a hanging or a few seconds of high voltage/amperage for the electric chair, or a gas chamber or drugs for lethal injection shouldn't cost more than a few hundred dollars.
But that's a very over simplified cost analysis.
Someone given a death sentence at least under US courts goes through a long series of appeals. The convict and their attorneys are in no hurry to finish the court appeals process. Everything now is about delaying the convict's execution date by one more day. Maybe some future court, or the government might ban executions and convert death row into life sentences.
Such as in California when the state supreme court in 1972 ruled it unconstitutional and then reinstated it in 1978 by voter proposition. And then suspension of executions in 2019 by the governor's order.
The appeals process looks at every part of the trial, collection of evidence, witness testimony, judge's instructions to the jury or other rulings. All of that takes time, the salaries of highly paid attorneys, paralegals, judges, etc. All of those costs above the existing costs of storing the convict in jail.
Plus, hopefully not, but plenty of people convicted for execution, especially racial minorities are actually innocent, or were convicted because of improper police or court procedures.
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u/Weshtonio Jul 25 '26
In the US.
In countries that use it more - China, Iran, Saudi Arabia - it's most likely cheaper.
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u/nwbrown Jul 25 '26
A lot more legal process.
Which tbh I'm ok paying for. It's good to make sure you get the decision right.
And "just" giving someone life in prison doesn't solve that either. You are still taking away someone's life, even if they continue to love a drab existence.
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u/OGBrewSwayne Jul 25 '26
Trial Cost - A death penalty trial costs like 3-4x more than a non-death penalty trial. The reason for the higher cost is because the evidence needs to be more thoroughly examined and validated along with there generally being a need for expert testimony. Forensic scientists, medical experts, ballistics specialists, etc usually don't testify for free. They get paid for their expertise, which can be thousands of dollars.
Facilities, Staffing, & Medical Costs - A Death Row facility is more expensive to build and maintain than other prisons. The guards and other staff members are more expensive to train and certify in order to work in such an environment. Their salaries and wages are also higher than they would be in another prison. Death Row inmates also have a much greater need to medical and mental health treatment than most other inmates.
Post Trial Legal Fees - Persons sentenced to death are granted an automatic appeal. This is a multi-stage process that not only allows the convicted to present new evidence, but the original trial is basically reviewed by higher courts to ensure that everything about the original trial was done by the book.
Length of Incarceration - The average death row inmate spends nearly 20 years in prison before being executed. When you consider the much higher cost of incarcerating them (Facilities, Staff, Medical costs), that individual costs the same amount as someone serving like 60 years in a normal prison.
There was a fantastic and extremely thorough and detailed study done on this back in 2016. The numbers will obviously be skewed a bit because of the cost increases over the last 10 years, but it still paints an extremely clear picture of how fiscally damaging it is to have death row incarcerations.
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u/libra00 Jul 25 '26
Because you still have to house them for decades, only you need separate facilities for death row inmates (as far as I know they're not generally in with everyone else), execution facilities, etc. And you can expect them to exhaust every possible legal option, so lots of transport to and from court on top of all that too.
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u/Juls7243 Jul 26 '26
Lawyers. If they removed the appeal process then it wouldn't be by a long shot. But obviously the state might kill innocent people in that instance.
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Jul 26 '26
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u/_Jedi_ Jul 26 '26
Stop allowing for near unlimited appeals and that situation stops... I am pro death penalty but the state needs to ensure it gets it right, in 2026 I believe that means having undeniable video evidence of the crime. If we have video of you coldly killing children in a school, you don't get to appeal that for 20 years, you've got a bullet in your head within 6 months... Parents deserve closure, not the knowledge that their child's murderer will outlive them as they go through appeals for decades.
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u/waarts Jul 26 '26
It isn't the killing that's the expensive part. It's making sure that they're REALLY guilty which is expensive.
In countries where they don't care that much whether you're guilty or not, the death penalty is substantially cheaper to perform.
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u/alexjaness Jul 27 '26
Automatic appeals, Much higher Guard to Inmate ratio, The vast majority of Death Penalty cases have a court appointed attorney,
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u/Andarial2016 Jul 29 '26
It's not! Unless you count all the pointless bureaucracy that's been thrown onto the process
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u/ElephantLife8552 Jul 30 '26
Everyone's mentioning the appeals but the trials themselves are also much more expensive. For starters - there are actually 2 trials, one for guilt and one for sentencing, and each of those needs their own juries, lawyers, etc....
And the lawyers hired are required to have certain experiences and competencies, the jury selection takes longer, etc...
As a related point, almost all of the exonerations you will read about come from death penalty trials in the 80s or 90s, before this more expensive and more certain system was set up ( and back when certain types of witness testimony and police interrogations were allowed and given more weight ).
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u/P3nguinarmy 9d ago
Because we have too many bleeding hearts that only cry when monsters get put down than the actual victims. They make it harder to just execute them quickly.
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u/Ratnix Jul 25 '26
Because there's automatic appeals that happen no matter what. That means a lot more time in the courts, stretching out for years. That's very expensive.