West Virginia Senate President Craig Blair is among the lawmakers clamoring to bring back the death penalty in the Mountain State, but doing so would be a bad idea.
West Virginia abolished capital punishment in 1965, but the last execution was in 1959. According to the West Virginia Encyclopedia, 94 men were put to death between 1899 and 1959 — in the early years by hanging and later by electric chair. Unsurprisingly, just under half of the men executed were Black, even though people of color made up less than 6% of the state’s population at the time.
We’re not going to argue the morality or ethics surrounding capital punishment, nor are we going to comment on what crimes Blair and his colleagues believe necessitate being put to death. For our purposes, we’re going to focus on the more pragmatic issue: Capital punishment is more expensive than West Virginia can afford.
It sounds counterintuitive, but a sentence of life in prison — with or without parole — is less expensive than an execution. That’s largely because of legal expenses. If a state is going to put someone to death, it had better be 100% right that said person is guilty.
Capital cases usually mean extra juror screening, more expert testimony, longer trials and more appeals, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. (A 2013 study found that death penalty cases lasted, on average, 148 days vs. life-in-prison cases, which lasted roughly 24 days; a 2014 Department of Justice report noted that the average time between sentencing and execution was 15.5 years.) Plus, death-row inmates are generally kept in solitary confinement, which requires extra security and accommodations.
According to the 2016 analysis “The Death Penalty vs. Life Incarceration,” published in the Susquehanna University Political Review: “Each death penalty inmate is approximately $1.12 million (2015 USD) more than a general population inmate.” (That’s $1.29 million in 2023 dollars.) The study explained, “This greater cost comes from more expensive living conditions, a much more extensive legal process, and increasing resistance to the death penalty from chemical manufacturers overseas. These costs could even become higher, pending the outcome of various lawsuits against various states for their ‘botched’ executions.”
West Virginia is already facing a crisis in our jails and prisons. Not only are they horribly understaffed, but also underfunded because some counties can’t afford to pay their existing jail bills.
Can you imagine adding an additional $1.29 million in taxpayer-funded expenses per inmate? The state doesn’t have that kind of cash, and it’s unfair to offload those costs onto taxpayers.
West Virginia killed the death penalty almost 60 years ago, and we’ve all lived just fine without it. Leave it dead.
