Whether the death penal­ty will be sought in a mur­der may depend more on the bud­get of the coun­ty in which it is com­mit­ted than on the sever­i­ty of the crime, accord­ing to sev­er­al pros­e­cu­tors. A report by the Marshall Project found that the high costs of cap­i­tal cas­es pre­vent some dis­trict attor­neys from seek­ing the death penal­ty. ​“You have to be very respon­si­ble in select­ing where you want to spend your mon­ey,” said Stephen Taylor, a pros­e­cu­tor in Liberty County, Texas. ​“You nev­er know how long a case is going to take.” One cap­i­tal case can bank­rupt a coun­ty: ​“I know now that if I file a cap­i­tal mur­der case and don’t seek the death penal­ty, the expense is much less,” said James Farren, the District Attorney of Randall County, Texas. ​“While I know that jus­tice is not for sale, if I bank­rupt the coun­ty, and we sim­ply don’t have any mon­ey, and the next day some­one goes into a day­care and guns down five kids, what do I say? Sorry?” Prosecutors cit­ed past cas­es in which coun­ties had to dras­ti­cal­ly alter their bud­gets in order to pay for death penal­ty tri­als. In Jasper County, Texas, a coun­ty audi­tor said the bud­get shock of a death penal­ty case was as bad as a flood that destroyed roads and bridges. Seeking the death penal­ty in one case in Gray County, Texas, forced the coun­ty to raise tax­es and sus­pend rais­es for employ­ees. The defen­dant was sen­tenced to life with­out parole. When Mohave County, Arizona, pros­e­cu­tor Greg McPhillips decid­ed not to seek the death penal­ty in a case he thought was par­tic­u­lar­ly heinous, he point­ed to costs as the rea­son: ​“The County Attorney’s Office wants to do their part in help­ing the County meet its fis­cal respon­si­bil­i­ties in this time of eco­nom­ic cri­sis not only in our County but across the nation,” he said.

Some coun­ties com­pare a death penal­ty case to being hit by a nat­ur­al cat­a­stro­phe: ​“It’s safe to say they hope they don’t ever get” a death penal­ty case, said Lonnie Hunt, an offi­cial with the Texas Association of Counties and a for­mer judge. ​“It’s like any­thing else — the peo­ple in charge of man­ag­ing the mon­ey of the coun­ty hope there isn’t a wild­fire or a tornado.”

(M. Chammah, ​“The Slow Death of the Death Penalty,” Marshall Project, December 17, 2014). See Costs, Arbitrariness, and New Voices.

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