In 2015, Billingsley was sentenced to 30 years in prison, with 16 years suspended, after he pleaded guilty to a first-degree sex offense, court records show.
The Maryland sex offender registry shows he was released from prison in October. The registry classified him in “tier 3,” which includes the most serious charges and requires offenders to register for life.
It costs just as much to go through the legal process of the death penalty as it does to imprison someone for life
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Extra legal costs:
https://ballotpedia.org/Fact_check/Is_the_death_penalty_more_expensive_than_life_in_prison
Doubt it mate. Give me the figures.
Sure
https://ballotpedia.org/Fact_check/Is_the_death_penalty_more_expensive_than_life_in_prison
Okay so, do you want to read that article? You can just skip to the conclusion part and the fact check done in 2018, since the article is from 2016…
-------------------------‐ Conclusion Was Dennis Davis correct when he claimed that death cases are more expensive than life in prison?
A preliminary study by South Dakotans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, examining first-degree murder cases since 1985 that have resulted in a death sentence or life in prison, found that on average, legal costs in death penalty cases exceeded those in the other cases by $353,105.[24]
The study was submitted to the State Affairs Committee of the South Dakota State Senate as part of the committee’s hearing on this year’s bill to abolish capital punishment.[3] The study was referenced by both proponents and opponents of the bill during the hearing, and its numbers were not refuted.
While the legal costs were greater, information from the South Dakota Department of Correction shows the average cost of long-term incarceration for a prisoner sentenced to death is lower than that of a prisoner serving a life sentence. Because there are no extra expenses involved in housing condemned prisoners, and those prisoners are incarcerated for less time in state prison, the average savings per prisoner is $159,523.[19]
Since the average savings in long-term incarceration is so much lower than the average additional legal costs, it appears Davis is correct about the cost of the death penalty versus life imprisonment in his home state.
Because the costs associated with capital punishment have not been studied in every state that has the death penalty, and because most of the existing studies are limited in scope, it is not possible to state definitively that the death penalty is always more expensive than life in prison in the United States. But the studies of capital punishment conducted since the Furman decision do offer support for Davis’ claim.
Fact Check- 1000 x 218 px.png Launched in October 2015 and active through October 2018, Fact Check by Ballotpedia examined claims made by elected officials, political appointees, and political candidates at the federal, state, and local levels. We evaluated claims made by politicians of all backgrounds and affiliations, subjecting them to the same objective and neutral examination process. As of 2023, Ballotpedia staff periodically review these articles to revaluate and reaffirm our conclusions. Please email us with questions.
Soooooo basically, yeah more expensive in legal fees but literally cheaper because they don’t spend 40 years rotting in a hole.
Also thats not what I’m talking about… pfft.
Did you read it? It costs 350K in legal fees to save 150K…
I did and the over cost out weights the initial cost… in the long run…
No, that 160K savings is incarceration costs, they don’t outweigh the TOTAL costs increase of 190K which are the legal costs minus the savings in incarceration
It doesn’t need to.
A lot of that cost is legal costs, to my understanding, going through the process of the defendant exhausting their appeals and such. Cutting that cost would mean a faster process with less time and opportunity to uncover mistakes, which would lead to even more executions of the falsely convicted
Right the standards are too low already as we have seen death row inmates exonerated and your plan to lower the cost is to lower the standards even further.
How about instead of trying to salvage a system that is clearly not working we abandon it. What is the absolute worst case scenario? A mass murderer piece of shit remains behind bars for that much longer. Instead of trying to lower the standards where the absolute worst case scenario is an innocent person gets killed.
I never said anything about that being a plan to lower costs or standards. My point was the opposite, that costs for capital punishment cannot be reasonably lowered without unacceptable sacrifices
Gotcha my bad
So like… why should there be a different appeal process for capital punishment vs. anything else?
Isn’t guilty guilty? Shouldn’t you have the same avenues of appeal, regardless of what the punishment is?
If that’s the case, then wouldn’t it be just as expensive to go through the appeal process for capital punishment as anything else?
There’s a much more intense appeal process because you can’t un-execute someone.
If some evidence turns up a decade later after someone has been imprisoned for life that proves them to be innocent, while you can’t give them that time back, you can release them and give them a hefty sum of many to at least attempt to repay what you’ve wrongly taken from them. But if you murder them, and they turn out to be innocent, then the government has murdered a completely innocent person for no reason, and nothing can be done to ever make that right.
In a perfect legal system, I think most people would be okay with the death penalty for the most heinous crimes. But because death is a final judgement that cannot be reversed, it needs an absolutely perfect justice system. And er, I don’t think anyone would accuse our justice system of being that.
So given that, it’s much much cheaper to just keep people locked up, and it saves us a lot of money. The only thing lost is a kind of moral righteousness and satisfaction in seeing criminals die, which I’d personally say is one of our less noble instincts anyway.
Honestly, I’d be against capital punishment even in an absolutely infallible justice system. If someone absolutely cannot ever be trusted to return to society no matter what rehabilitative options are available, then locking them up indefinitely still accomplishes this, while also resulting in less death overall
I’d personally agree (and amusingly enough, so would the Catholic Church, though they weirdly don’t talk about that as much as some other social issues).
Ultimately though, that’s more a question of moral principles, which are a lot harder to argue and less persuasive than simply talking about cold hard cash.
The problem is an issue of cost. It’s impossible to imprison someone for decades at a lower rate than executing them.
Executions are expensive, but they don’t need to be. He mentioned the “appeal process,” when I then said should be the same regardless of the punishment.
So… wouldn’t the same thing occur for innocent people who die in prison? Nothing can ever be done to make it right. It’s the same as sentencing them to death, only much slower and more expensive.
I don’t know. I see most people against the death penalty saying that they don’t support the death penalty because of some lofty “the government has no right to kill its citizens” principle. Not really based on anything, but it ‘sounds nice’ so I guess people go for it.
It doesn’t need to be. It’s at least possible to execute people for a cheaper price than imprisoning them. We just choose not to do it.
The essential difference is the ability for new evidence to come to light that exonerates the prisoner.
Simply put, there exist a non-trivial amount of people who were wrongfully imprisoned and later freed that would be dead now if we were looser with the death penalty. Some righteous bloodlust is not more valuable than their lives.
More simply, if you were wrongfully imprisoned, you’d probably be quite thankful for how hard it is to actually apply the death penalty. It’s really that simple.
The alternative is accepting a significantly greater chance of the murdering innocent people.
Which is generally a disturbing proposition to most people, but I won’t pretend to know how empathetic you may or may not be.
If you want to let people just get executed without appeals, sure. But then innocent people who are depressed by their guilty verdict might choose to die instead of fighting in the legal system