Justin Wolfers, an econ­o­mist and senior fel­low at the Brookings Institution, recent­ly under­scored the prob­lems iden­ti­fied in a sweep­ing rul­ing hold­ing California​’s death penal­ty uncon­sti­tu­tion­al. ​“Capital pun­ish­ment,” Wolfers said, ​“is not only rare, but it’s also an extra­or­di­nar­i­ly long and drawn-out process.” For many offend­ers, ​“death row may actu­al­ly be safer than life on the street.” He com­pared the rel­a­tive­ly few exe­cu­tions to the large num­ber of peo­ple on death row: ​“A sim­ple thought exper­i­ment makes the point: If a death sen­tence puts you at the back of the queue of 3,000 pris­on­ers to be exe­cut­ed, and only 50 peo­ple are exe­cut­ed each year, then it would take you, on aver­age, 60 years to reach the front of the line. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, many die of nat­ur­al caus­es while wait­ing their turn.” He con­clud­ed by quot­ing the fed­er­al judge in the California rul­ing that a death sen­tence is effec­tive­ly a sen­tence of ​“life in prison, with the remote pos­si­bil­i­ty of death.”

(J. Wolfers, ​“Life in Prison, With the Remote Possibility of Death,” New York Times, op-ed, July 18, 2014). See Arbitrariness and New Voices.

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