Kansas Death Penalty Cost Report
Summary by Death Penalty Information Center

The State of Kansas recent­ly issued a report esti­mat­ing the costs of the death penal­ty in that state: ​“Performance Audit Report: Costs Incurred for Death Penalty Cases: A K‑GOAL Audit of the Department of Corrections,” (December 2003).

Conclusions

  • The esti­mat­ed cost of a death penal­ty case was 70% more than the cost of a com­pa­ra­ble non-death penal­ty case. Death penal­ty case costs were count­ed through to exe­cu­tion (medi­an cost $1.26 mil­lion). Non-death penal­ty case costs were count­ed through to the end of incar­cer­a­tion (medi­an cost $740,000).
  • Items:
    • The inves­ti­ga­tion costs for death-sen­tence cas­es were about 3 times greater than for non-death cases. 
    • The tri­al costs for death cas­es were about 16 times greater than for non-death cas­es ($508,000 per death case; $32,000 per non-death case). 
    • The appeal costs for death cas­es were about 21 times greater.
    • The costs of car­ry­ing out a death sen­tence (includ­ing death row incar­cer­a­tion) were about half the costs of car­ry­ing out a non-death sen­tence in a comparable case.
    • Trials involv­ing a death sen­tence aver­aged 34 days, includ­ing jury selec­tion; non-death tri­als aver­aged about 9 days.
  • For death sen­tence cas­es, the pre-tri­al and tri­al lev­el costs were the most expen­sive parts: 49% of the total costs. The costs of appeals were 29% of the total, and incar­cer­a­tion and exe­cu­tion costs account­ed for the remain­ing 22% of the total.


Limitations

The report stressed that ​“actu­al cost fig­ures for death penal­ty and non-death penal­ty cas­es in Kansas don’t exist,” and that there were numer­ous lim­i­ta­tions on the cost esti­mates made, including:

  • The num­ber of cas­es was small, (7 peo­ple have received a death sen­tence since the pun­ish­ment was rein­stat­ed in 1994), and no cas­es have com­plet­ed the appeals process or result­ed in executions.
  • For many of the par­tic­i­pants in the legal process, no case-spe­cif­ic time records were kept. The Kansas Supreme Court has heard only 2 death cas­es, and the Court did not pro­vide esti­mates of the time spent by the justices.

Comments

The Kansas study is a wel­come and seri­ous con­tri­bu­tion to the rel­a­tive­ly sparse lit­er­a­ture on the costs of the death penal­ty. All death penal­ty cost stud­ies involve numer­ous esti­mates and assump­tions, and the Kansas study report was thor­ough in reveal­ing the lim­i­ta­tions of its study. Some of the assump­tions made may have result­ed in sig­nif­i­cant­ly under­es­ti­mat­ing the total death penalty costs:

  • Kansas assumed that all indi­vid­u­als cur­rent­ly await­ing exe­cu­tion will be exe­cut­ed. However, since the death penal­ty was rein­stat­ed in the U.S., only about 10% of those sen­tenced to death have been exe­cut­ed. A recent study at Columbia University Law School found that about 68% of death penal­ty cas­es were over­turned on appeal. When those cas­es were sub­ject to a re-tri­al, an esti­mat­ed 82% result­ed in a sen­tence less than death. It is like­ly that Kansas’ cap­i­tal cas­es will expe­ri­ence a sim­i­lar diminu­tion. Since it is only after an exe­cu­tion that a death penal­ty case becomes less expen­sive than incar­cer­a­tion cas­es, the assump­tion that all death sen­tences will result in exe­cu­tion may pro­duce less over­all costs than is war­rant­ed. In all like­li­hood, some (if not most) Kansas death cas­es will be over­turned after lengthy appeals, the defen­dants will be re-sen­tenced to life, and then the costs of incar­cer­a­tion for many more years will be added on to the costs of pur­su­ing the orig­i­nal death penalty.
  • In con­clud­ing that death sen­tence cas­es cost 70% more than non-death cas­es, the report does not appear to add in the costs of cas­es where the death penal­ty was sought, but not achieved at tri­al. The report states that there were an equal num­ber of these case and esti­mates that the medi­an cost of such cas­es was almost 30% more than the medi­an in which the death penal­ty was nev­er sought. The added costs accrue because seek­ingthe death penal­ty at tri­al is more expen­sive than not seek­ing it at tri­al, regard­less of the out­come. These extra costs could be added to the 70% costs above to give a truer com­par­i­son between death and non-death cases.
  • The report bases its most impor­tant con­clu­sion on the medi­an (mid­dle) cost of the sev­en death cas­es con­sid­ered. This can be decep­tive when the num­ber of cas­es is very small. Another approach would have been to take the mean (aver­age) costs of the cas­es. Using this mea­sure, the aver­age death sen­tence case would be about 93% more expen­sive than the aver­age non-death penal­ty case of sim­i­lar sever­i­ty, even with­out mak­ing the oth­er adjust­ments suggested above.

The Kansas study focus­es on the costs of indi­vid­ual cas­es. With more time and resources, the analy­sis could be tak­en fur­ther to com­pare the costs to the state of a death penal­ty sys­tem with the costs of a non-death penal­ty sys­tem. Such an analy­sis might incor­po­rate the costs men­tioned above. These extra costs to the tax­pay­er could be cal­cu­lat­ed in total and per exe­cu­tion, as they were in the North Carolina study con­duct­ed at Duke University in 1993. Both the indi­vid­ual case approach tak­en in Kansas, and the sys­temic approach tak­en in North Carolina depend on like­li­hood of future exe­cu­tions, which are always spec­u­la­tive.

The full report is avail­able at http://​www​.ksleg​is​la​ture​.org/​p​o​s​t​a​u​d​i​t​/​a​u​d​i​t​s​_​p​e​r​f​o​r​m​/​0​4​p​a​0​3​a.pdf.