On May 28, the Nevada Senate passed a bill autho­riz­ing an audit of the cost of the state’s death penal­ty. By a vote of 11 – 10, the Senate called for the leg­isla­tive audi­tor to com­pare the costs of pros­e­cu­tion and appeals in cap­i­tal cas­es to non-death penal­ty cas­es, exam­in­ing the cost of defense lawyers, juries, psy­chi­atric eval­u­a­tions, appel­late and post-con­vic­tion pro­ceed­ings. The audi­tor would also exam­ine the cost of an exe­cu­tion, includ­ing the costs of facil­i­ties and staff. The report would be due Jan. 31, 2013. Nevada has not had an exe­cu­tion since April 2006, and has 77 inmates on death row. The bill orig­i­nal­ly called for a mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions, but prison offi­cials said they did not present­ly have the drugs to car­ry out an exe­cu­tion any­how. The bill now goes back to the Assembly.

(C. Ryan, ​“Lawmakers advance bill to con­duct audit on death penal­ty costs,” Las Vegas Sun, May 28, 2011).

Other states have stud­ied the costs of their cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sys­tems and found that imple­ment­ing the death penal­ty is very expen­sive. A report from the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice esti­mat­ed the annu­al costs of the death penal­ty sys­tem to be $137 mil­lion per year. A New Jersey Policy Perspectives study found that the state’s death penal­ty cost tax­pay­ers $253 mil­lion since 1983, a fig­ure that is over and above the costs that would have been incurred had the state uti­lized a sen­tence of life with­out parole instead of death. Finally, a study in Kansas found that inves­ti­ga­tion costs for death-sen­tence cas­es were about 3 times greater than for non-death cas­es, and tri­al costs for death cas­es were about 16 times greater than for non-death cas­es. See Costs.

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