End Indiana's Death Penalty

 I ran across this editorial Should Indiana move on from the death penalty? and could not resist reading. In another life, in another galaxy, I had a partner who did death penalty cases. The longer I practiced law and the more acquainted I got with juries, the less sure I had been of the death penalty. In law school, I had written a case comment that got me onto law review on the subject of Massachusetts' death penalty. The Massachusetts court made a comment that stuck with me: a wrongful execution has no means of being appealed. That should explain most of my interest in the subject.

The writer makes the usual attacks on cost, financial and moral:

Instead of having eight men sit for years under the nebulous threat of death perhaps Holcomb and/or legislators should commute those sentences to life in prison without parole and join the 23 states that don’t have the death penalty.

As defense lawyer Eric Koselke told the Capital Chronicle he thinks the current situation is “cruel and unusual punishment. I mean, they’ve been there for years waiting to be executed and I can’t imagine living under that kind of pressure.”

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The Legislative Services Agency in 2015 found the average cost of a capital-murder case tried before a jury was $789,581, more than 4.25 times greater than the average cost of a murder case tried to a jury in which the prosecution sought life without parole ($185,422).

A second assessment found death-penalty cases resolved by a plea agreement are still significantly more expensive than non-capital cases that go to trial. The $148,513 average expenditure counties paid for capital cases that were resolved by plea was 4.43 times more than their average expenditure for a life-without-parole case tried to a jury.

But let me suggest another reason for commuting the sentences of those on Indiana's Death Row and doing away altogether with Indiana's death penalty: Indiana is one of the most pro-life states in the country. 

sch 9/2/22