Pennsylvania’s tax­pay­ers have paid an esti­mat­ed $272 mil­lion per exe­cu­tion since the Commonwealth rein­stat­ed its death penal­ty in 1978, accord­ing to an inves­ti­ga­tion by The Reading Eagle. Using data from a 2008 study by the Urban Institute, the Eagle cal­cu­lat­ed that cost of sen­tenc­ing 408 peo­ple to death was an esti­mat­ed $816 mil­lion high­er than the cost of life with­out parole. The esti­mate is con­ser­v­a­tive, the paper says, because it assumes only one cap­i­tal tri­al for each defen­dant and it does not include the cost of cas­es in which the death penal­ty was sought but not imposed. The total cost may exceed $1 bil­lion. An ear­li­er inves­ti­ga­tion had esti­mat­ed a cost of at least $350 mil­lion, based on the 185 inmates who were on death row as of 2014, but addi­tion­al research into the cas­es that had already been over­turned, or in which inmates died or were exe­cut­ed pri­or to 2014, revealed a total of 408 peo­ple who had been sen­tenced to death. Pennsylvania has car­ried out only three exe­cu­tions under its cur­rent death penal­ty statute. State Senator Stewart Greenleaf, a Republican and chair­man of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said, ​“We’re scratch­ing for every dol­lar that we can right now. To con­tin­ue to spend that kind of mon­ey is hard to jus­ti­fy.” The Eagle​’s inves­ti­ga­tion also uncov­ered geo­graph­ic dis­par­i­ties in the appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty. 60% of all death sen­tences came from just four coun­ties: Philadelphia, Allegheny, York, and Berks. Death sen­tenc­ing rates also var­ied dra­mat­i­cal­ly, with about a third of coun­ties hand­ing down zero death sen­tences, while three (Columbia, Cumberland, and Northumberland) had 5 or more death sen­tences per 100 mur­ders. Somerset District Attorney Lisa Lazzari-Strasiser, who has filed one death penal­ty case in five years as District Attorney, said, ​“I think our sys­tem is bro­ken. It does­n’t do jus­tice to any one of the stake­hold­ers, in my opin­ion, not the tax­pay­ers, the vic­tims or the defen­dants. It doesn’t work.”

(N. Brambila, ​“Executing Justice: Pennsylvania’s death penal­ty sys­tem costs $816 mil­lion,” The Reading Eagle, June 17, 2016; N. Brambila, ​“Executing Justice: The dis­cre­tionary nature of the death penal­ty in Pennsylvania,” The Reading Eagle, June 20, 2016.) See Costs and Arbitrariness.

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