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Can We Afford the Death Penalty?

By Jonathan Simor

My colleague Elisabeth Semel (Director of Berkeley Law's death penalty clinic) raises some troubling questions about California's dysfunctional death penalty on the oped page of the SacBee. Lis highlights the perversity of watching California spends millions to maintain a system that whatever its theoretical benefits has contributed so little to our security or prosperity (death penalty supporters should note that execution has "resolved" only about a dozen cases since the penalty was restored by constitutional amendment in 1978 at an overall cost in the billions), while it gets ready to gut its already anemic education, law enforcement (as opposed to corrections), and social service budget.Californians are all too familiar with the fact that while we rank 47th in the nation in per-pupil public school spending on a cost-adjusted basis, we are first in what we pay for prisons and on the administration of the death penalty...continue to full post

Full post as published by Governing Through Crime on May 18, 2009 (boomark / email).