The Death Penalty in Louisiana

Post by maxerickson » Thu, Jul 02, 2015, 2:56 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #6

nickthemagicman wrote: post #2

I live in Louisiana. America has the highest incarceration rate per capita amongst all countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera... Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_incarce... Tis truly a messed up place.

Those numbers for the states are based on prisoners under state jurisdiction (excluding county jail in other states), does the parish system potentially factor into Louisiana dealing with a larger percentage of incarcerations at the state level?

So I compared Orleans Parish to Sedgwick, County Kansas (Wichita is the next larger US city than New Orleans) and Orleans Parish operates a multiple of the number of beds as Sedgwick County, so I guess it isn't a big factor.

Hard to control for the different atmosphere in New Orleans though.

Post by maxlybbert » Fri, Jul 03, 2015, 3:35 AM UTC

kawakiole wrote: post #96

maxlybbert wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's only true because the cost of appeals is included in the cost of having somebody on death row. For the record, I'm very happy that people on death row get so many appeals. I'm very happy that some of those appeals are automatic (all states I'm familiar with automatically appeal any death penalty sentence to the state supreme court). But given that the average death row inmate lives 20 years or so in custody, a…

How on earth is the cost of a legal appeal not directly related to jail?

The statement that "putting people on death row costs more than putting them in prison for life" is incomplete. The complete statement is "under our current legal regime, including costs of various appeals, putting people on death row costs more than putting them in prison for life."

Since the costs of appeals dwarfs all other relevant costs, it's just as true to say "under the current legal regime, appeals for death row inmate cost much more than appeals for life sentence inmates." That's a very different statement, and not necessarily something we want to fix.

If we did want to fix it, we could either spend less money on appeals for death row inmates (make it much harder to get off of death row/get exonerated), or spend more money for appeals for life sentence inmates.

Indeed, it might just be that we aren't doing everything we should to find wrongfully convicted inmates who weren't given the death penalty.

But that's certainly not the message people seem to be trying to make with the statement. The message I've always heard was "it would cost less to put him in jail for life." Or "it would cost less to get rid of the death penalty altogether." The first message has less impact when you realize that the costs involved are nearly all about legal appeals, not about running a prison, feeding the prisoners, etc. The second message is provably false: in a regime without the death penalty, the resources currently used to get people off death row would be used to get people out of life sentences.

Re: The Death Penalty in Louisiana

Re: The Death Penalty in Louisiana