Execution Costs in Idaho Take Center Stage with New Firing Squad Law

A bill that Idaho Governor Brad Little signed into law in March 2023, autho­riz­ing the use of the fir­ing squad as a method of exe­cu­tion, went into effect on July 1, 2023. This law grants the direc­tor of Idaho Department of Corrections (IDOC) the author­i­ty to deter­mine if lethal injec­tion is avail­able and, if deemed unavail­able, to car­ry out the exe­cu­tion by firing squad.

Included in the new law is an esti­mat­ed cost of $750,000 to ren­o­vate a cell block at Idaho Maximum Security Institution suit­able for the new exe­cu­tion method. According to Senator Doug Ricks (R‑Rexburg) a co-spon­sor of the bill, much of this cost stems from ​“the manda­to­ry area so observers can wit­ness an exe­cu­tion… If that was not there, it’d be much, prob­a­bly less expen­sive….” Critics argue that the increased cost will hurt tax­pay­ers in the long-term, but Ricks claims the bill does not increase IDOC spend­ing. He argues that since Idaho tax­pay­ers already pay approx­i­mate­ly $36,500 a year to house each death row pris­on­er, many for more than two decades, the one-time ren­o­va­tion cost, already in the IDOC bud­get, rep­re­sents a frac­tion of what tax­pay­ers spend on lengthy appeals process­es and prison sentences. 

Death penal­ty cost analy­sis from two of Idaho’s neigh­bor­ing states, Washington and Oregon, how­ev­er, demon­strate an increase in all costs asso­ci­at­ed with using cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. The study from Washington state, released in 2015, reviewed 17 years of data and con­clud­ed that the aver­age cap­i­tal case cost $3.1 mil­lion, com­pared to $2 mil­lion spent to pur­sue a non-cap­i­tal case. Using 13 years of data, the Oregon study, released in 2016, con­clud­ed that the aver­age costs of a death penal­ty case neared $2.6 mil­lion, while the pur­suit of a non-cap­i­tal case cost on aver­age $1.7 mil­lion. There is also an erro­neous belief that life impris­on­ment costs more than the death penal­ty. A 2017 study pre­pared for the Oklahoma Death Penalty Review Commission, that used 16 years of data, deter­mined that across the coun­try, seek­ing a death sen­tences costs, on aver­age, $700,000 more than seek­ing a life sen­tence. Deborah Denno, an expert on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment and law pro­fes­sor at Fordham University told the Idaho Statesman that she does not ​“know how any­body could pos­si­bly argue with these sta­tis­tics or even ques­tion them at all. It’s across the board, across the coun­try, dif­fer­ent states, but across dif­fer­ent times, too, giv­en the length-of-time cost studies conducted.”

In 2014, Idaho researchers attempt­ed to study the eco­nom­ic costs of the state’s death penal­ty but were unable to address the true costs asso­ci­at­ed with it because of lim­it­ed data. Rakesh Mohan, the direc­tor of Idaho Legislature’s Office of Performance Evaluations wrote that ​“col­lect­ing com­pre­hen­sive data would require a con­sid­er­able amount of effort and resources for stake­hold­ers but would like­ly not result in any­thing dif­fer­ent than what we already know from nation­al and oth­er states’ research.” His office’s study found that cap­i­tal cas­es take longer than non-cap­i­tal cas­es because of the com­plex statu­to­ry require­ments. Idaho has not car­ried out an exe­cu­tion in over a decade and many crit­ics ques­tion how the state uses tax­pay­er dol­lars to main­tain cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. The pub­lic is gen­er­al­ly unaware of how this mon­ey is spent, and accord­ing to Ritchie Eppink, an Idaho civ­il rights attor­ney, ​“regard­less of one’s views on the death penal­ty, the pub­lic should be able to weigh in on this and weigh in on this in a ful­ly informed way, which [they’re] still not able to do.”