This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
"Though justice be thy plea, consider this, that, in the course of justice, none of us should see salvation: we do pray for mercy."
— William Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venice"
If justice costs more, we pay for justice. If justice costs less — a lot less — we are, as the Bard said, "twice blest."
Last week, some members of the Utah Legislature were putting themselves though some unsightly, if not uncomfortable, contortions to try to get around the fact that carrying out the death penalty in Utah — and everywhere else in the United States — costs more than a life sentence.
How much more? About $1.6 million more per case.
That's because any sense of justice requires that the ultimate penalty not be dispensed sloppily. That every possible legal argument, every piece of evidence, every safeguard against the most ghastly of legal errors, be set in motion before the state commits an act of irreparable violence.
The state's own budget analysts and lawyers told the members of the Law Enforcement and Criminal Justice Interim Committee that those costs, borne by taxpayers in the counties where the cases are tried, are not something the Legislature has the power to influence.
They are the result of rules imposed by the federal court system. Any desire state officials may have to shorten the process, perhaps reducing the cost, simply will not happen.
And that is as it should be. While the chances of putting the wrong person to death are smaller in Utah than they are in the states (Texas, Florida) where the death house is practically an assembly line, no state should pride itself on the quick turn-around of its capital punishment machine.
The analysis also suggests that local prosecutors seek the death penalty in fewer and fewer eligible cases. Whether that's because of the cost to taxpayers, the additional emotional burden imposed on the families of murder victims or just disgust with the very idea of state-sanctioned homicide, the decision of which accused killers face the death penalty and which do not are increasingly a lottery that has little to do with justice.
Utah would obviously be better off following through on the effort that was made in the last session of the Legislature to just abolish the death penalty. The kind of conservative thinking that Utah politicians pride themselves on should have led to the realization that there is nothing at all conservative about giving the state, which is supposedly not competent enough to do much of anything, the power to kill people.
Keeping the death penalty would also lead to further debate over just how to do the deed. Lethal injection has proven to be anything but humane. Drug makers, who don't want their products associated with death, are less and less willing to provide the fatal concoctions.
And Utah's old firing squad is a relic of a brutal age that casts the state in the most negative light before the world.
The legal, ethical and financial arguments necessary to make the death penalty seem like anything other that what it is — thuggish, expensive vengeance that harms everyone it touches — are getter harder and harder to make, or believe.
It's time to end this practice, once and for all.