The ACLU of Colorado estimates the cost of a death penalty trial to be $3.5 million dollars as opposed to a trial seeking life without parole, which costs around $150,000. The difference, according to the ACLU, is enough to pay over 70 firefighters or teachers for a year, or to provide hundreds of students access to Head Start. These increased costs associated with death penalty prosecutions are not mere coincidences. State and federal constitutional provisions require heightened -- and costly -- procedures when a prosecutor seeks the ultimate, irreversible penalty.
In a recent study, court docket entries from 1999 to 2010 were used to analyze the total number of court days, including pretrial proceedings, trial, and sentencing, that were required for capital murder cases versus murder cases prosecuted for life imprisonment without parole. Using this data, it is possible to see that a death penalty trial takes approximately 153 court days, as compared to a prosecution for life without parole, which takes an average of just over 24 days of court time.
Even more striking, this same data reveals that a death penalty prosecution takes much, much longer to progress from an initial charge to an actual sentence, not even counting any appeals. In jury trial cases, a capital prosecution from charging to sentencing takes, on average, 1,902 days. By contrast, jury trial cases in life without parole prosecutions took approximately 526 days. The difference, then, is almost four full years of delay in the trial court alone, without even considering the differential in time required for appeals. This time equals delays in justice for victims, and hard costs for taxpayers.
Source: Huffington Post, November 21, 2013
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