Chief Judge William Wilkins of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit recent­ly spoke about the death penal­ty to a gath­er­ing at the Charleston School of Law in South Carolina. He com­ment­ed that deci­sion-mak­ers will have to eval­u­ate whether the pun­ish­ment is worth its increas­ing finan­cial costs. But he also not­ed how dif­fi­cult it is for a politi­cian to speak open­ly about this issue: ​“I think polit­i­cal­ly, you’re not going to find a can­di­date run­ning on ​‘Let’s do away with the death penal­ty,’ ” Wilkins said. ​“No one (in South Carolina) can be elect­ed to statewide office who is opposed to the death penal­ty.”

Wilkins said oth­er options should be explored that would save mon­ey and still pre­serve the impo­si­tion of jus­tice. One alter­na­tive he men­tioned was ensur­ing life in prison for mur­der­ers but with­out the chance of parole. ​“Think about it, what would you pre­fer?” he asked the stu­dents: death or life con­fined in a cage? He not­ed that the tens of mil­lions of dol­lars spent on the death penal­ty could go to edu­ca­tion or health care. He described the impo­si­tion of the death penal­ty in the U.S. as ​“a hit or miss thing.”

(Charleston Post & Courier, Sept. 15, 2006; Associated Press, Sept. 14, 2006). See New Voices, Costs, and Life Without Parole.

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