The actual execution is relatively cheap and the incarceration of a death row inmate is not significantly more expensive than the incarceration of any other inmate.
Where the costs differ is in the prosecution / trial. Capital cases involving the death penalty are much more costly to prosecute. The defense typically gets 2-3 attorneys (even for indigent defendants) you also have numerous expert testimony and then there are the automatic appeals and the numerous other appeals that are typically filed.
A few years ago, the statistics were that about 70% of death penalty cases were overturned on appeal. THAT DOES NOT MEAN THE PERSON WAS WRONGFULLY CONVICTED, JUST THAT THE DEATH SENTENCE WAS COMMUTED TO LIFE.
FINANCIAL FACTS ABOUT THE DEATH PENALTY
• The California death penalty system costs taxpayers $114 million per year beyond the costs of keeping convicts locked up for life.
Taxpayers have paid more than $250 million for each of the state’s executions. (L.A. Times, March 6, 2005)
• In Kansas, the costs of capital cases are 70% more expensive than comparable non-capital cases, including the costs of incarceration.
(Kansas Performance Audit Report, December 2003).
• In Indiana, the total costs of the death penalty exceed the complete costs of life without parole sentences by about 38%, assuming
that 20% of death sentences are overturned and reduced to life. (Indiana Criminal Law Study Commission, January 10, 2002).
• The most comprehensive study in the country found that the death penalty costs North Carolina $2.16 million per execution over the
costs of sentencing murderers to life imprisonment. The majority of those costs occur at the trial level. (Duke University, May 1993).
• Enforcing the death penalty costs Florida $51 million a year above what it would cost to punish all first-degree murderers with life in
prison without parole. Based on the 44 executions Florida had carried out since 1976, that amounts to a cost of $24 million for each
execution. (Palm Beach Post, January 4, 2000).
• In Texas, a death penalty case costs an average of $2.3 million, about three times the cost of imprisoning someone in a single cell at
the highest security level for 40 years. (Dallas Morning News, March 8, 1992).
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/FactShee…