Study Finds Louisiana Spends An Extra $15 Million Per Year on Death Penalty

A new study of Louisiana​’s death penal­ty reports that the state’s cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sys­tem costs tax­pay­ers at least $15.6 mil­lion a year more than a sys­tem with life with­out parole as the max­i­mum sen­tence. The study by retired New Orleans dis­trict Chief Judge Calvin Johnson (pic­tured, left) and Loyola Law Professor William Quigley (pic­tured, right), released on May 2, 2019, found that Louisiana has spent more than $200 mil­lion on its death-penal­ty sys­tem in the last 15 years, result­ing in a sin­gle exe­cu­tion of a pris­on­er who gave up his appeals. The researchers pro­ject­ed that, for an offense com­mit­ted after August 1, 2019, it would cost tax­pay­ers more than a quar­ter bil­lion dol­lars to keep in place its cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment sys­tem from the time of arrest to the time of an eventual execution.

For their study, Johnson and Quigley exam­ined data com­piled by the Louisiana Department of Corrections, the Louisiana Public Defender Board, and the Louisiana Legislative Fiscal Office to arrive at what the authors char­ac­ter­ize as ​“a con­ser­v­a­tive esti­mate” of the system’s costs. ​“The actu­al costs may be sig­nif­i­cant­ly high­er, as the costs do not include the pros­e­cu­tion or court costs spent on cap­i­tal cas­es that ulti­mate­ly did not go to tri­al as a cap­i­tal case, or the costs of Louisiana Supreme Court review,” they said. Quigley sum­ma­rized the study’s find­ings, say­ing, ​“Louisiana has spent over $200 mil­lion in the past 15 years, to oper­ate a bro­ken death penal­ty sys­tem in which 83% of the death sen­tences imposed at tri­al [that have com­plet­ed appel­late review] have been over­turned. Louisiana has to decide whether it wants to spend more than $250 mil­lion dol­lars in the future, for a death penal­ty sys­tem that has result­ed in more exon­er­a­tions than exe­cu­tions over the last 15 years.”

Louisiana has exe­cut­ed only one per­son in the past 15 years, Gerald Bordelon in 2010. Bordelon dropped his appeals and ​“vol­un­teered” for exe­cu­tion. In that same peri­od, the state has exon­er­at­ed five peo­ple: Dan L. Bright and Ryan Matthews in 2004, Damon Thibodeaux in 2012, Glenn Ford in 2014, and Rodricus Crawford in 2017. Dating back to 1976, when the U.S. Supreme Court struck down Louisiana’s then-manda­to­ry death penal­ty, the state has sent 242 defen­dants to death row. Ten of those pris­on­ers were sub­se­quent­ly exon­er­at­ed — or 4.1% of every death sen­tence imposed. Police or pros­e­cu­to­r­i­al mis­con­duct played a major role in each of the wrong­ful cap­i­tal con­vic­tions. The study report­ed that Louisiana has the nation’s high­est per capi­ta death-row exon­er­a­tion rate and the high­est rate of death sen­tences over­turned on appeal.

The study’s authors esti­mate that Louisiana would have to spend at least $281 mil­lion to main­tain the death penal­ty long enough to exe­cute a per­son arrest­ed this year for cap­i­tal mur­der. They found that Louisiana death-penal­ty cas­es take approx­i­mate­ly three years after arrest to reach tri­al. Once sen­tenced to death, pris­on­ers spend an aver­age of 17.6 years before being exe­cut­ed. ​“The study reveals how shock­ing­ly lit­tle Louisiana gets in return for the mil­lions being spent on the death penal­ty,” said Marcus Maldonado, Louisiana Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty Advisory Committee mem­ber. ​“It is a stag­ger­ing sum and an inde­fen­si­ble gov­ern­ment expen­di­ture when you con­sid­er all this mon­ey results in rever­sals, wrong­ful con­vic­tions, and no pub­lic safety benefit.” 

Two death-penal­ty abo­li­tion bills were pro­posed in the Louisiana leg­is­la­ture this year, spon­sored by Sen. Dan Claitor (R‑Baton Rouge) and Rep. Terry Landry (D – Iberia). One of them, SB 112, a con­sti­tu­tion­al amend­ment abol­ish­ing cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, failed in the Senate on May 6. A bill to con­ceal infor­ma­tion about the state’s lethal-injec­tion drug pur­chas­es was report­ed favor­ably from a House com­mit­tee on May 7 and is sched­uled for floor debate on May 20.