The state of Nevada is set
to execute Scott Dozier on Nov. 14 for the 2002 murder of Jeremiah Miller in Las Vegas. And for the first time since the 2006 execution of Daryl Mack, the debate on capital punishment in Nevada shifts from philosophical abstraction to stark reality.
For the moment, let’s ignore how they do it in other states and other countries. Pay no attention to the opinions of out-of-state politicians, national media pundits and global religious leaders. Nevada’s death penalty is for Nevadans to debate.
And in the opinion of the RGJ Editorial Board, the death penalty does not serve Nevada in any way.
Proponents have argued that the crime of first-degree murder deserves nothing less than the ultimate punishment, and that the existence of the death penalty deters violent crime and gives prosecutors another weapon in their arsenal to solicit plea bargains. Available evidence suggests those things are not true in this state.
Fear of the death penalty doesn’t deter violent crime.
The homicide rate hovered below 15 per 100,000 Nevadans in the mid-1970s, when the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled the death penalty to be unconstitutional. The rate spiked to 20 homicides per 100,000 residents in 1980, four years after the death penalty was reinstated. Similarly, the rate of violent crime in the state surged in the late ’70s and early ’80s despite the return of capital punishment.
Over the past 13 years, as states have begun to place moratoriums on the death penalty or abolish it altogether, Nevada — one of 31 states practicing capital punishment — has ranked in the top 10 for violent crime per capita every year since 2002, and in the top 5 every year since 2006. If potential criminals in Nevada have any apprehension about committing violent crime, it’s not reflected in the numbers.
Prosecutors aren’t using the threat of the death penalty to encourage plea bargains.
The death penalty isn’t used strategically to avoid trials or elicit plea bargains — in fact, plea bargaining takes place about 14 percent less often when defendants potentially face the possibility of capital punishment, according to a death penalty performance audit commissioned by the 2013 Nevada Legislature.
In fact, the bureau directly asked the district attorneys’ offices in Washoe and Clark counties if the death penalty was used as a bargaining tool. Both offices said no; Clark County DA Steve Wolfson said the practice would be “unethical.”
The cost of seeking the death penalty wastes taxpayer dollars that could be used for other law enforcement needs.
The Legislative Counsel Bureau’s report found that costs for incarcerating inmates prior to execution were lower than incarcerating inmates serving life sentences without the possibility of parole — approximately $175,000 less per inmate. But 11 of the 12 inmates executed in Nevada since 1976 gave up on their right to continue appealing their conviction. When death-row inmates continue to pursue appeals, the LCB found that incarceration costs were slightly higher than those serving life without parole.
The most significant cost difference between the death penalty and life without parole is in trial and appeal costs. Pursuing the death penalty costs approximately $532,000 per case more than murder cases where the death penalty isn’t sought, due to separate trials for sentencing, automatic appeals and other procedural safeguards to ensure fair, error-free trials.
Those are dollars that can and should be used by Nevada’s counties for public safety — law enforcement salaries, crime lab equipment, search-and-rescue funding. The presence of capital punishment doesn’t seem to have any impact on Nevada’s rate of violent crime; allocating tax dollars to pursue the death penalty instead of other law enforcement functions is making Nevadans less safe.
Over time, we've changed our thinking.
Over the years, our thinking has evolved on the death penalty. As far back as the 1870s, the Nevada State Journal wrote both pro- and anti-death penalty editorials; the editorials, written years apart, both expressed the belief that Nevada's crime rate would be reduced based on their way of thinking.
Capital punishment “does not diminish respect for life, but proclaims the high value of life for all its citizens,” read a Reno Evening Gazette editorial in 1979. We lamented “the seemingly endless string of appeals” available to death-row inmates in a 1997 editorial.
But since 2001, the RGJ Editorial Board has grown increasingly wary of the death penalty, based on the cost, the sentencing of underage defendants and the mentally disabled, and the chance that insufficient legal counsel and a rush to prosecute could lead to the execution of an innocent person. For just over a decade, we have believed that the system is far too flawed to fix, and have called for the abolition of the death penalty in Nevada.
Once again, with another execution date approaching, the RGJ Editorial Board is calling for an end to capital punishment in the state of Nevada. As a crime deterrent, a prosecutorial tool and a use of tax dollars, it just doesn’t make sense for the Silver State.
Source: Reno Gazette Journal, Editorial, November 9, 2017
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
