Opponents of the death penalty have made a serious tactical error. Rather than stress what is by far their strongest argument—the partially persuasive claim that the government should not, ethically, be in the business of killing people—they have instead stressed the “cost” of executions. The fact, that is, that it costs more to sentence somebody to death than to life without parole.
The problem with this argument—besides its green-eye-shade bloodlessness over a literally bloody subject—is that the reason executions cost so much is that the condemned receive an extraordinarily lengthy appeals process, which gums up the courts for years on end. The people who make the “executions are just too darn expensive” argument are unwittingly arguing for speedier executions.
And that’s exactly what they’ve achieved in California. The nation’s most populous state considered two capital punishment referenda this week. One would have banned capital punishment outright. The other would have, as the Los Angeles Times put it, sped “up executions by designating trial courts to hear petitions challenging death row convictions, limiting successive petitions and expanding the pool of lawyers who could take on death penalty appeals.”
In the event, the referendum ending capital punishment lost. The referendum expediting capital punishment won.
