Saddam's Husein's classy execution

[BarbaraGordon]

Originally Posted by creekster

Thanks, but it is not art, and not even photojournalism; ask Mike. Any guesses as to where it is?

uhhhh...Iberian Peninsula? Looks like a mosque but that doesn't help me too much. There are mosques everywhere, right?

What do I know? I've never even been out of the country. Unless you count Texas, which they used to say was "A whole other country."

[Archaea]

Originally Posted by BarbaraGordon

From LexisNexis:
Studies show that it costs more to keep an inmate on death row and to put him or her to death than it does to keep him or her in jail for life. Cases that begin as capital trials - where the punishment being sought is the death penalty - are much more expensive than normal murder trials. The process is longer, tying up our courts for more time, which in turn costs us more money in taxes. In a recent study, Duke University researchers showed in North Carolina, capital cases costs an average of $2.16 million more per case.


Nice avatar pic!

These studies are questionable. The only additional costs that are not already fixed are those paid to outside defense attorneys, (yet outside defense attorneys are also used in nondeath penalty cases). I know several who have done "appointment" death penalty cases, and none of them have charged anywhere close to a tenth of that much.

Does a jury cost more in a death penalty case than a nondeath penalty case? As far as I know, the jury fees are statutorily established irrespective of the crime.

And unless the studies have changed since I last reviewed them, the severity of penalty was not the deterring factor but the certainty of penalty. The difficulty with deterrents under our system is that penalty, be it incarceration or death, is uncertain. Hence, criminals are not deterred.

In countries where penalties are more certain crime rates tend to be lower. In Singapore, which has the death penalty, crime rates are relatively low.

In sum, I challenge the validity of those cost analyses, because they don't make sense, and usually incorporate so many fixed costs that the government pays whether we have a trial or not. For example, if a trial takes longer, they figure a larger portion of the judge's salary. That's nonsense.