EVANSVILLE — Seeking the death penalty in Indiana has become an expensive proposition, and one that often doesn't end with execution.
Only 16 percent of Indiana's death penalty cases — 30 out of 188 — filed from 1990 through 2009 ended in death sentences, according to the Indiana Public Defender Council.
Such statistics have given death penalty foes a solid economic argument, and even supporters of the death penalty are calling for reforms to control skyrocketing defense costs often born by local and state governments.
Vanderburgh County's record is as mixed as the state's. In the last two decades the county spent more than $800,000 defending death penalty cases, each more expensive than the last.
Only one of the county's last five death penalty trials resulted in an execution.
"If there is something broken it is the courts' allowance of a blank check for the defense," said Clark County Prosecutor, Steven Stewart, a recognized death penalty expert in the state.
Indiana criminal procedure allows defense attorneys to make expense requests to trial judges without input from prosecutors.
"The No. 1 defense strategy is to make it as expensive and burdensome as they can. That is just a fact of life. That is the way it is," Stewart said.
The risk for judges in not allowing defense requests, he said, is that the refusal might become grounds for a successful appeal.
Yet with $500,000 from the county's general fund already budgeted for Jeffrey Weisheit's trial in February, and an additional $27,000 in committed from the public defender's office, that trend could continue. Weisheit's defense expenses so far have pushed the county's pretrial expenditures defending capital cases past $1 million.
These kinds of trial expenses have forced other, more rural counties to raise taxes, Stewart said.
