Fifty years of experience has taught us that no matter how hard the government tries to get this system right, it fails at every turn, from convicting innocent people to botching execution procedures, all while spending millions of taxpayer dollars in the process.
Cost
Many people believe that the death penalty is more cost-effective than housing and feeding someone in prison for life. In reality, the death penalty’s complexity, length and finality drive costs through the roof, making it much more expensive.
Why does the death penalty cost so much?
“Death is different.” Today’s choice is between an expensive death penalty system and one that risks falling below constitutional standards. Every stage of a capital case is more time-consuming and expensive than in a noncapital case. If the defendant is found guilty of a capital crime, an additional trial is required, with new witnesses and new evidence, in which the jury must decide whether the penalty should be death or less than death, like life without parole (LWOP).
Capital punishment is an inefficient, bloated program that bogs down law enforcement, delays justice for victims’ families, and devours millions from crime-fighting resources that could save lives and protect the public.
Public Safety
A 2008 poll by Death Penalty Information Center surveyed 500 U.S. police chiefs and found:
- When asked to name one area as “most important for reducing violent crime,” greater use of the death penalty ranked last among police chiefs, with only 1 percent listing it as the best way to reduce violence.
- The death penalty was considered the least efficient use of taxpayers’ money. They ranked expanded training for police officers, community policing, programs to control drug and alcohol abuse, and neighborhood watch programs as more cost-effective ways to use taxpayers’ money.
In 2020, only 50% of murders in the U.S. were solved. From 2017-2020, the Memphis Police Department had a clearance rate of 32%; Nashville, 43%; Knoxville, 37%; and Chattanooga, 39%.[i] This reality leaves surviving families of murder victims fearful and without the finality that they need. Taxpayer dollars would be better spent solving more of these cases than pursuing the death penalty for those already incarcerated.
Tennessee needs real solutions: If Tennesseans truly want to embrace a culture of life and to find effective responses to crime, we should be focused on healing and crime prevention, investing in trauma informed solutions that focus on accountability, mental health, and early intervention to prevent crime. We should be solving more violent crime, and we should get victims of violence and surviving families of murder victims the resources that they need to heal so that their healing isn’t reliant on what happens to the people who’ve caused them harm.
[i] The Marshall Project, As Murders Spiked, Police Solved About Half in 2020, January 2022 https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/01/12/as-murders-spiked-police-solved-about-half-in-2020
Innocence
- Though it costs Tennessee taxpayers millions more per case than the alternative sentences, the death penalty still gets it wrong. At least 189 people in the U.S., who were wrongfully convicted and sentenced to death, have been exonerated and freed since 1972. That is one person exonerated and released for every 8.2 people who were executed (189 exonerations/1547 executions based on updated data through June 29, 2022).[i]
- Tennessee has had three death row exonerations. Another wrongfully convicted man who spent 20 years on death row and a total of 28 years in prison took an Alford plea, allowing him to maintain his innocence while pleading to a lesser offense that he also didn’t commit in order to obtain his immediate release. Pervis Payne, who was removed from death row because of his intellectual disability, is still fighting to prove his innocence.
- Tennessee wrongly denied DNA testing to Sedley Alley before executing him and continues to oppose available DNA testing that could determine whether it wrongfully executed an innocent man
[i] Death Penalty Information Center’s Death Penalty Census, June 2022 https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/death-penalty-census/key-findings
Victims’ Families
To be meaningful, justice should be swift and sure. The death penalty is neither. It prolongs pain for victims’ families, dragging them through an agonizing and lengthy process that promises an execution at the beginning but often results in a different sentence in the end. The death penalty showers resources and attention on a few cherry-picked cases, telling families that some lives are more important than others.
Fairness
When the color of your skin, the amount of money you have in the bank, your mental health status, or the county in which you live have an outsized impact on whether or not you receive a death sentence, the system has a serious problem. This is the reality of Tennessee’s death penalty system.
The death penalty does not put the same value on all human life. Executions are much more common in cases with white victims: 78% of executions in the U.S. in the past 50 years involved white victims; 15% involved Black victims; 7.6% involved Latinx victims, even though white victims only make up around half of all homicide victims.[i]
The death penalty disproportionately impacts those who are most vulnerable, including juveniles, as well as people with severe mental illness, brain injury, and severe untreated trauma.
Tennessee’s death penalty does not value the sanctity of human life and denies the power of redemption and atonement by those who have caused harm.
The death penalty is geographically arbitrary, meaning the same crimes may receive very different penalties depending on the county in which the crime occurs. Just 1.1% of all counties in the U.S accounted for half of everyone on death row while 2% of U.S. counties accounted for half of all executions as of January 1, 2021.[i
In Tennessee, just four counties—Shelby, Davidson, Knox, and Hamilton—account for 70% of Tennessee’s death row. Shelby County alone accounts for 49%. While Davidson County, the second largest county after Shelby, only accounts for 8.5%. Tennessee’s rural counties are paying to maintain the death penalty used mostly by urban areas.
The death penalty asks too much of Tennessee Department of Correction officers, ranked among the lowest paid in the nation, to carry out executions without medical or pharmaceutical expertise. These individuals must live with the mental and physical trauma of taking a human life and with the consequences when something goes terribly wrong.
[i] Death Penalty Information Center’s Death Penalty Census, June 2022 https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/facts-and-research/death-penalty-census/key-findings
[i] BJS: Bureau of Justice Statistics, Homicide Trends in the U.S., 2005 https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/htius.pdf