In a series of arti­cles ana­lyz­ing Pennsylvania’s death penal­ty, the Reading Eagle found that tax­pay­ers have spent over $350 mil­lion on the death penal­ty over a peri­od in which the state has car­ried out just three exe­cu­tions, all of inmates who dropped their appeals. Using data from a Maryland cost study, which con­clud­ed that death penal­ty cas­es cost $1.9 mil­lion more than sim­i­lar cas­es in which the death penal­ty was not sought, the news­pa­per esti­mat­ed that the cas­es of the 185 peo­ple on Pennsylvania’s death row cost $351.5 mil­lion. The paper said the esti­mate was con­ser­v­a­tive because it did not include cas­es that were over­turned, or cas­es where the pros­e­cu­tor sought the death penal­ty but the jury returned anoth­er sen­tence. Pennsylvania leg­is­la­tors com­mis­sioned a cost study in 2011, but the report has not been issued. Senator Daylin Leach, one of the leg­is­la­tors who called for the state report, said he will rein­tro­duce a bill to repeal the death penal­ty. Even sup­port­ers of the death penal­ty agreed that the costs are a prob­lem: ​“Definitely, the death penal­ty extreme­ly strains our resources,” said Berks County District Attorney John Adams. Judge Thomas Parisi, also of Berks County, said he believed there was an astro­nom­i­cal cost dif­fer­ence between the aver­age death penal­ty case and a life-sentence case.

John Roman, author of the Maryland study used by the Reading Eagle, said it was impor­tant to know the costs of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. ​“I think it changes the nature of the debate because what it’s say­ing is let’s not just ask if the death penal­ty is bet­ter than not hav­ing the death penal­ty,” he said. ​“It’s say­ing, giv­en the death penal­ty is far more expen­sive, is it still worth having?”

(N. Brambila, F. Turner, and M. Urban, ​“Capital pun­ish­ment in Pennsylvania: When death means life,” Reading Eagle, December 14, 2014). See Costs and Arbitrariness.

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