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Playing with the economics of the death penalty

By Douglas A. Berman

A helpful reader forwarded to me this fascinating local story headlined, "Arapahoe County DA Charges Death-Penalty Fees to the State: How does DA Carol Chambers beat the high cost of a death-penalty prosecution? By billing the prison system."  Here is how it start:The State of Colorado has managed to execute one murderer in the past forty years.  Its death row, current population one, is among the smallest in the country.  For four years after a 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision threw out the state's system of having three judges decide whether an inmate should be executed, not a single new capital case was filed. Some prosecutors regard the pursuit of the death penalty in the Centennial State as an exercise in futility...continue to full post

Full post as published by Sentencing Law and Policy on February 28, 2008 (boomark / email).