Natasha Whittam wrote:
There are too many people walking this planet that don't deserve to. Take this Mark Bridger bastard who killed April Jones - sentenced to life in prison. What's the point of paying for his upkeep (upwards of £500k in total) when he could be executed for a fraction of the price.
I wondered if that was true and according to what came up in google, it isn't (with American law anyway)-
'Kansas: “The study counted death penalty case costs through to execution and found that the median death penalty case costs $1.26 million. Non-death penalty cases were counted through to the end of incarceration and were found to have a median cost of $740,000. For death penalty cases, the pre-trial and trial level expenses were the most expensive part, 49% of the total cost. The investigation costs for death-sentence cases were about 3 times greater than for non-death cases. The trial costs for death cases were about 16 times greater than for non-death cases ($508,000 for death case; $32,000 for non-death case).” (. Kansas: Performance Audit Report: Costs Incurred for Death Penalty Cases: A K-GOAL Audit of the Department of Corrections)'
Washington State “At the trial level, death penalty cases are estimated to generate roughly $470,000 in additional costs to the prosecution and defense over the cost of trying the same case as an aggravated murder without the death penalty and costs of $47,000 to $70,000 for court personnel.” (Final Report of the Death Penalty Subcommittee of the Committee on Public Defense, Washington State Bar Association, December 2006,
North Carolina: The most comprehensive death penalty study in the country found that the death penalty costs North Carolina $2.16 million more per execution than the a non-death penalty murder case with a sentence of life imprisonment (http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/northcar…
links to ("The Costs of Processing Murder Cases in North Carolina" Duke University, May 1993)