[cheerfulgreek]

Originally Posted by Kevin

Should he be? Sure... he probably ought to be thrown to the lions or committed to some other sort of cruel sort of punishment.

But what you're talking about when you're talking about putting a man to death are thousands of man-hours of appeals both in terms of lawyers' time and judges' time. Time that IMHO, would be better spent elsewhere.

You're also talking about separate holding facilities, actual costs of executions, etc.

It's far cheaper to keep these prisoners for life than it is to put them to death because of all of these costs surrounding the death penalty. It's not like it has any redeeming qualities like preventing further homicides, etc.

My father's stepfather sat on the Oklahoma Criminal Court of Appeals (the state's final appellate court for criminal cases). He once opined that the one thing he knew about the death penalty is that once it's administered, the recidivism rate was zero. Perhaps there's something to that, but as far as I can tell, its' just not worth it.

Huh? How is it cheaper to keep them for life? What if a person is given the death penalty, and that death penalty that was given, is appealed through the courts for 30-40 years? Because that's what always seems to take place. Kevin, I'm not talking about "life" in prison, because that could possibly be 1/3 of the actual sentence as opposed to life in prison without parole. So, I'm talking about life in prison without parole. Kevin, you know more than I do, but I'm asking. How would that be cheaper? I'm guessing (depending on the state) it probably cost the tax payer about $50,000 to $60,000 dollars per year per inmate, so why not just use the death penalty for those who are not getting out of prison and assess the penalty of death at the time sentencing without appeal? It's just that I can't see how keeping them in prison could possibly be cheaper. I just think that doing it this way would just eliminate a bad person from society, and it would also save money that could be used somewhere else.