Portland observer., November 23, 2016, Page Page 5, Image 5

November 23, 2016
Page 5
Pursuing Justice
by
b obbin s ingh
Our Broken and Wasteful Death Penalty System
Most Oregonians living today
cannot even remember a time
when our state’s death penalty was
used as it was intended: To exe-
cute those deemed to have com-
mitted crimes so serious that they
had forfeited their right to life.
For many decades now – in
fact since the 1960s – Oregon’s
death penalty has been a study
in waste, confusion and a lack of
leadership. While voters reinstat-
ed the death penalty in 1984, one
of many changes of mind on capi-
tal punishment in Oregon, the past
32 years have seen only two exe-
cutions and then only because the
people condemned waived their
right to appeal.
So what’s the problem with
Oregon’s death penalty? Activ-
ists speak about Oregon having
a death penalty “in name only”
since the punishment remains on
the statute books and new death
sentences are occasionally issued
but there’s little prospect of exe-
cutions being carried out. It’s a
comforting phrase that reassures
us that it doesn’t matter if we
continue to have capital punish-
ment in Oregon since we’re not
actually going to get down to the
messy work of taking a human life
in the name of the state. But it’s a
delusion because despite the lack
of executions, we are all paying a
high price for Oregon’s death pen-
alty.
Last week saw the joint release
of an academic study on the finan-
cial cost of Oregon’s death penalty
by Lewis & Clark Law School in
Portland and Seattle University
in Washington state. The project
was funded by my organization,
Oregon Justice Resource Center,
because if we’ve learned anything
about capital punishment in Ore-
gon while we’ve been investigat-
ing the issue, it’s how little we
really know about how it works in
practice.
This is the first time anyone has
given a detailed look at how much
it is costing Oregonians to contin-
ue their arms-length relationship
with the death penalty. Until now,
we had no idea of the extent of the
costs being generated by the sys-
tem.
A snapshot: Death sentence
costs four times, or one million
dollars more than a life sentence
for a comparable crime. That’s
counter to the popular assumption
that executions save money by
putting an abrupt end to the cost
of housing, feeding, and clothing
someone in prison for the rest of
their life. But the fact is, even if
Oregon were to start executing
people again, it would still be
more expensive because of the
massive legal costs associated
with death penalty cases.
Those legal costs are generat-
ed by the tremendous amount of
work required for a death penalty
trial by prosecutors, defense attor-
neys and the courts. The years of
appeals that follow add their own
expense until we arrive at a situ-
ation where Oregon taxpayers are
spending millions of dollars on a
punishment that all those involved
know is highly unlikely ever to be
carried out. In the meantime, the
families of the victims in these
cases must see the worst event of
their lives repeatedly dragged up
in yet another court hearing as the
years go by without a final reso-
lution.
One answer would seem to be
to simplify, simplify, simplify. Cut
down on the work of the trial and
the court appeals process and the
price will fall accordingly. If our
death penalty system were, bar-
ring the cost, a perfect system that
never made a mistake, that might
be an option. But there are 156
people walking around alive today
in the U.S. who can tell you why
that’s a bad idea.
They are the so-called “death
row survivors”, the people who
were wrongfully convicted of
heinous crimes and sentenced to
die before eventually providing
their innocence. Their stories are
a horrifying collection of griev-
ous mistakes, misconduct and, in
some cases, downright criminal
behavior, by those who are trust-
ed to run our death penalty sys-
tem. We know the system gets it
wrong, far more often than we’d
like. Cutting down on the scrutiny
given to death cases and you will
only see more of these wrongful
convictions and further increase
the risk of an innocent person be-
ing executed.
So what’s the solution? How
do we finally fix our broken death
penalty system? Last month, Gov.
Kate Brown reaffirmed the mora-
torium or ban on executions that
was put in place in 2011 by her
predecessor. She did so because
she recognizes as many Orego-
nians do, “that serious concerns
remain about the constitutional-
ity and workability of Oregon’s
capital punishment law.” While
the moratorium ends executions,
it does nothing to prevent new
death sentences or slow the prog-
ress of cases through the system.
In short, we are still spending
c ontinued on p age 15