Death Penalty More Costly Than Life Sentence?

A blogger this morning held that the cost of executing an inmate in America is far greater than condemning him to life in prison without parole. Come again? Any person with an iota of intelligence could learn from the Internet that the average cost of housing an inmate in the U.S. is about $30,000 a year. If a mass murderer was, say, 25 years old when convicted and lived to be 75, then the total cost of housing him for those 40 years would amount to $1,200,000 in constant 2010 dollars. If executed, on the other hand, the cost of the lethal injections administered would be no more than $100. One would gather, then, that the blogger making that outlandish claim was either afflicted with a severe mathematical handicap, or was on some powerful mind altering drug. But no, it turned out that he was a wily defense lawyer. The cost he was talking about was the legal cost of repeated appeals on this or that technicality, from which his colleagues and their clients, would, of course, benefit handsomely, and at the public’s expense.