The West Virginia Legislature is moving a bill that would bring the death penalty back to the state, more than 65 years since our last execution.
Across the country, the use of capital punishment has been in rapid and precipitous decline as lawmakers and the public have realized that capital punishment is costly, ineffective and deeply flawed. Reinstating the death penalty at this point would be a serious step backward for our state.
Multiple studies have shown that the death penalty is a very expensive program, resulting in few, if any executions. In Maryland, a comprehensive cost study by the Urban Institute estimated the extra costs to taxpayers for death penalty cases prosecuted over a period of 21 years was $186 million. New York spent about $170 million during the nine-year period of its reinstatement and had no executions. New Jersey spent $253 million over a 25-year period and also had no executions. All three states subsequently ended the death penalty after realizing how frustrating and ineffective it was.
In addition to the financial burden, there are numerous intangible costs to a state for having the death penalty. Most important is the unavoidable risk of executing an innocent person. Since 1973, 200 men and women have been exonerated and freed from death row. The execution of an innocent person can never be undone.
There are also inequities in how the punishment is handed out. Only a tiny few of those who are legally eligible for a death sentence actually receive it, and most of those are never executed. Instead, it is often defendants with poor representation or those suffering from mental illnesses or other impairments who end up being executed. It is also frequently applied in a racially discriminatory manner.
The death penalty fails to deter crime in any meaningful way. The prestigious National Research Council of the National Academies concluded that studies over a 30-year period claiming a deterrent effect on the commission of murder from the death penalty were fundamentally flawed. The council recommended that these studies not be used to justify use of capital punishment. A more recent study, by the Death Penalty Policy Project, found that “law enforcement officers were disproportionately killed in the line of duty in states that had the death penalty, as compared to states that didn’t. Police were the least safe in death penalty states and the safest in the states that had most recently abolished capital punishment.â€
For decades, West Virginia has had one of the lowest murder rates in its geographic region, while almost all the other states in the region used the death penalty and had higher murder rates. Moreover, the average time between sentencing and execution in the states with the death penalty has gradually increased to 20 years. It is unreasonable to believe that such an unpredictable and distant punishment acts as an effective deterrent or serves the families of murder victims who seek healing.
As a result of all of these problems, and mounting evidence that the death penalty is a failed policy, the annual number of death sentences in our country has dropped by 92% since the late 1990s. Executions have declined by about 70% in that same period. The number of states that have abolished capital punishment has been increasing. Public support for the death penalty has reached its lowest level in about 50 years, and the majority of Americans now believe the death penalty is not administered fairly.
West Virginia is surrounded by states that also reflect this decline. Maryland, which had five executions over a 35-year period, elected to abolish capital punishment in 2013. Virginia ended its death penalty in 2021, after having no executions since 2017. Pennsylvania had only three executions over the past 50 years, all of them involving defendants who waived their final appeals. The governor there has imposed a moratorium on executions and has asked the legislature to send him a bill abolishing the death penalty. Ohio has had no executions since 2018, and bipartisan legislation to end capital punishment has been making steady progress. Kentucky has had only three executions over a 48-year period, and none for the past 15 years.
Reinstating the death penalty at this time would inflict enormous costs on the taxpayer and a significant burden on the courts, with no measurable benefit to society. It would risk innocent lives and offer a false promise to victims’ families. The millions of dollars that the death penalty would require could surely be better spent on more productive programs to help those in need around the state.
