And in Louisiana, the Orleans Parish district attorney's office has considered filing for bankruptcy protection after it was ordered to pay $15 million to John Thompson. He sued prosecutors after he was acquitted of murder and freed from death row; a jury found that prosecutors had engaged in misconduct.
"This is a time where if you have a government program and it's not producing a lot but it's costing a lot, then it's ripe for examination," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center. "It's not like libraries, which you need, or other crucial programs. This is a program that's not really producing."
The scrutiny of the costs of capital punishment comes as the death penalty is in decline. Prosecutors are obtaining fewer death sentences -- in part because more states offer juries the option of life without the possibility of parole -- and states are carrying out fewer executions.
Many of the costs are built into the system and cannot be changed. They include the costs of specially trained defense lawyers, mental health and mitigation experts, and a longer course of appeals. And there are the many added costs of housing death row prisoners.
"As long as you have a death penalty system, you'll have regular expenses. And those expenses aren't getting cheaper," Dieter said. "There's a maintenance cost to the death penalty."
Death penalty cases can have an outsized effect in smaller counties, which tend to have smaller budgets. There, a case can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars -- close to $1 million if the issues are particularly complicated -- and force officials to cut programs to fund the prosecution.
Prosecutors say they have to take that into consideration, although it is not the only factor.
"Any good prosecutor is going to have to consider cost, especially in smaller, rural counties," said R. Lowell Thompson, district attorney for Navarro County in Texas, south of Dallas.
"But cost isn't the only consideration. Our job is to seek justice, and we have to carry that out."
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smmills@tribune.com
