Article of Interest: Maricopa County Investigation: Capital Cases are Costly, Lack Transparency in Charging Decisions, and Rarely End in Death Sentences

A joint inves­ti­ga­tion by ProPublica and ABC15 Arizona reviewed more than 300 cas­es over the past two decades where Maricopa County pros­e­cu­tors sought the death penal­ty and found that only 13% result­ed in death sen­tences. In most cas­es a jury nev­er got close to con­sid­er­ing whether to sen­tence some­one to death: in more than three-quar­ters of cas­es, defen­dants pled guilty in exchange for less­er pun­ish­ment, or pros­e­cu­tors reversed course before tri­al. In only 41 of 76 cas­es (54%) that went all the way to a cap­i­tal tri­al did a jury sen­tence some­one to death. The remain­ing 35 tri­als end­ed with the jury find­ing the defen­dant not guilty, or find­ing them guilty but reject­ing or dead­lock­ing on the death penal­ty. Former County Attorney Rick Romley, after review­ing the investigation’s find­ings, called for a review of the office’s cap­i­tal charg­ing deci­sions. ​“The jury is kind of a barom­e­ter of whether or not you’re doing a good job,” he said. ​“And quite frankly…if it was a school grade, that’s called an F.” 

ProPublica and ABC15 also reviewed the trans­paren­cy of cap­i­tal charg­ing prac­tices among the largest pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al offices in Arizona and across the United States. In Maricopa County, a Capital Review Committee eval­u­ates cas­es and rec­om­mends to the County Attorney whether to pur­sue the death penal­ty. The reporters found prac­tices var­ied wide­ly across the state and the coun­try, but even so, Maricopa County stood out as an out­lier for ​“obscur­ing near­ly every aspect” of the Capital Review Committee’s work. While many major pros­e­cu­tors’ offices across the coun­try out­line at least some aspects of how they choose to pur­sue the death penal­ty, Maricopa with­holds vir­tu­al­ly all details about its inter­nal com­mit­tee mem­ber­ship or decision criteria. 

The inves­tiga­tive report also drew atten­tion to the cost to tax­pay­ers of pur­su­ing cap­i­tal cas­es. Nationally, stud­ies show cap­i­tal cas­es can cost up to three times more than non­cap­i­tal cas­es. The report recount­ed the case of Jodi Arias, who was con­vict­ed in 2013 for killing her boyfriend. Maricopa County pros­e­cu­tors twice sought the death penal­ty for Ms. Arias, and twice the jury dead­locked. She was final­ly sen­tenced to life in prison. According to offi­cials at the time, the two tri­als cost the coun­ty $3.2 mil­lion. The total cost of the death penal­ty in Maricopa County is unknown because the coun­ty attorney’s office does not gen­er­al­ly track how much it spends pros­e­cut­ing capital cases.