Cameron County Can't Afford Death Penalty Prosecutions

How much does it cost to kill a man? How much should it cost?

North Carolina estimated that that an execution costs $2.6 million more than a non-death murder case. Florida says $3.2 million per prosecution, but the average cost of those executed has averaged out at $24 million. Californians have paid more than a quarter of a billion for each of the state's eleven executions.

The Dallas Morning News estimates that each Texas death penalty case costs an average of $2.3 million.

The trial alone involves a hefty increased fee. The State of Kansas estimated $508,000 per capital case more than plain vanilla murder. The State of Washington said it was $470,000 on top of the costs for another type of murder. Washington also estimated as much as an additional $70,000 for court personnel and $100,000 for appeal.

In a February 4, 2008 article in the New Yorker Magazine called Death In Georgia: The high price of trying to save an infamous killer’s life by Jeffrey Toobin, the author describes a trial in which the entire indigent defense budget of the county of $1.2 million was exhausted before the first juror was picked. The case had to be put on hold until more money could be found.

Cameron County has charged about 100 people with capital murder according to an i-docket count. These cases appear to go back about ten years.

I recently requested a count of the number of pending capital prosecutions in Cameron County. The number is an extraordinary 18 cases with two on death row.

With even a conservative price of, say, $2 million per execution and Cameron County proposes to execute all twenty of these people, the price will be about $40 million. I am not accountant, but this looks to me like it is impossible with Cameron County's budget.

Nor am I very good at reading budgets, but it appears that the Cameron County's 2008 is $111 million. The indigent defense budget is located in two places. One is for personnel in the amount of $199,000, down from $223,000 in 2007 and the other from a General Fund in the amount of less than $900,000. My guess is the second number represents the approximately $6,000 per month per court for contract attorneys and appointments and the first number is court personnel who run the system, but I welcome correction and explanation from the numbers crunchers among you, Readers True.

Assume that no new capital indictments are issued and the costs of the 20 now targeted for death is spread out over five years, that is still $8 million per year. The entire cost of the jail for 2008 is only about $4 million. The district courts are $2.4 million a year. The County Courts at Law run $1.5 million.

In other words, to truly prosecute and defend this many capital cases, the expense would be greater than the entire criminal and civil justice system in Cameron County. We would need to shut down the jail and all the courts to be able to fund the prosecutions, but of course then we would have no place to put or try the capital inmates. Either that or cut into indigent health care, burials and road crews.

So if the numbers are impossible, how is it that Cameron County is pretending to prosecute 18 pending capital cases with two on death row. I have a couple of guesses. One is that many of these 18 shouldn't be capital cases at all and will be reduced, but only after small fortunes are spent to pretend they are capital cases for a while. Another is that the judges will try to defend these cases without spending this much money.

Every old-time criminal lawyer has a story about how he was made to take a capital case, worked on it for months or years and then either not paid or paid a pittance. Other horror stories abound of expert witnesses who were stiffed. Differently put, the county pretended to pay for the defense of capital cases, but did not. So the quality of justice was low, which means in in a capital case that the risk of executing the innocent was high.

The law has changed in the last few years so that if the lawyer falls asleep in the course of the trial of a capital case or the trial judges refuse to pay for needed expert witnesses, the cases will be reversed and sent back to be tried again. For a defense to be constitutional, every defendant must have a mitigation specialist thoroughly investigate the background of the defendant and present that information at trial to support life rather than death. He must have a psychologist on the trial team. He must be able to investigate the facts and have experts who can analyze the physical evidence. He must have parity with the state in resources.

As far as I can tell, these minimum requirements have not been met in the past. Under these conditions, if things are not done better now than they were before, Cameron County may produce some death penalty convictions, but they won't be legal.

We will enter into an endless cycle of cheap, illegal trials that have to be redone because no one has the political will to require that indigent capital defendants receive a defense that meets minimum requirements of the constitution. Because of lawyer errors, we will likely get some executions, but we won't really know if the people being executed are guilty.

We pay a high price for cheap justice.