Lawmakers, agencies and industries are known to quibble over the value of a human life when deciding whether the benefits outweigh the costs of a proposed law or regulation. The EPA, for example, puts a person's worth at $10 million. But Florida's politicians never ask, nor do they seem to care, about the cost of taking a life.
The answer would undermine their allegiance to the death penalty.
Studies elsewhere agree that sending a criminal to the execution chamber is many times more expensive than to try, convict and imprison him for life. It costs California, with the largest death row, an estimated $170 million annually. On learning that, Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a moratorium.
In Florida, a single case is about to cost $7 million, minimum. That's what the prosecution and defense estimate it will cost to have a jury decide whether Nikolas Cruz should die or serve life in prison without parole for killing 17 students and staff — and wounding 17 more — at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. That doesn't include the cost of appeals if the verdict is death.
The evidence of what Cruz did on Valentine's Day 2018 is so overwhelming that the only question is whether he will be put to death many years from now or forever locked away on Aug. 28. Cruz has offered to plead guilty without trial, accepting 34 life sentences, if State Attorney Mike Satz would agree to take the death penalty off the table.
But Satz is refusing to do that, even though his intention to not seek reelection next year should eliminate political pressure from the equation. He says the community should decide.
From Satz's point of view, if the Parkland massacre doesn't deserve the death penalty, what does? If he didn't demand it for Cruz, who is white, how could he justify it for someone black or Hispanic who kills 1 or 2 people during a robbery?
Those are pertinent questions, but they beg a bigger one: Is the death penalty worth the cost for what arguable good it does? We think the answer is no. The death penalty's time has passed in most other industrial nations and should here as well. So long as the death penalty remains on the books, prosecutors will feel bound by duty or politics to regularly demand it, regardless of the expense.
With Cruz, our community's costs are traumatic as well as financial. Satz wants to walk jurors through the 1200 Building, where the massacre occurred. That means BSO must pay to preserve the building as a crime scene, even though the school district wants to tear it down. It also means MSD students must continue to relive the mental and emotional horrors every time they walk past that building. To Satz, it's critical evidence.
But it's critical only to getting the death sentence. That extra dose of trial psychology does not justify its harm to the students.
After the recent mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, this might strike some as an inopportune time to question the death penalty. To the contrary, those outrages demonstrate the futility of the death penalty as a deterrent. Ohio and Texas are death penalty states. Texas has executed more people — 561 — than the next 6 states combined.
The federal government also has announced that it is resuming executions. Since Dylan Roof was sentenced to death in January 2017 for murdering nine black worshippers at a Charleston, S.C., church, there have been 19 more mass shootings, according to the Washington Post's very conservative tally, which excludes robberies, domestic violence and gang wars. The Gun Violence Archive, using much broader measures, numbers 566 just since Parkland a year and a half ago.
What passes for conventional wisdom among foolish people holds that the only thing wrong with the death penalty is that it takes too long to carry out. But the courts are not going to rush people into the death chambers, as President Trump proposes. Nor should they. The staggering number of death row exonerations since 1972 — 166, including 29 in Florida alone — warns against any such haste.
Deterrence obviously didn't work on Cruz, whose case could set new records for expense, at least locally.
Florida now requires a unanimous vote to condemn someone to death. Is it worth wagering $7 million to execute someone who admits his guilt? Florida policymakers can't avoid such questions forever.
Source: Sun Sentinel, Editorial Board, August 28, 2019
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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
