y Fox Butterfield of the New York Times is this: why cant a nation where 70 percent of the population says it supports the death penalty achieve its stated goal: to speed up the process and deliver swift justice to its most vicious criminals? There is the statement that Americans are ambivalent about capital punishment regardless of the polls. There is the willingness of judges to hear the many numbers of appeals, and this lengthens the whole punishment process. There is also, in California, a four-year wait for prisoners to receive an appeal lawyer. This and the fact that more people are being added to the death row line-up are causing a bottleneck in the whole system. Butterfield notes that Gerald Kogan, chief Justice of the Florida Supreme Court, points out that the death penalty is not working. Some of his justices, he said, are spending up to half of their time just on death penalty appeals. He suggested that sentencing murders to life without parole might make more sense. A group of people strongly opposing the death penalty set up a webpage called Death Penalty Focus on California. It provides statistics and reasons behind the fact that the death penalty costs too much. The reason is because of the constitutional mandated safeguards that cause capital punishment trials to cost more. These safeguards include: an extensive jury selection procedure, increase in motions filed, more investigators and expert testimony, more death penalty specialized lawyers, and mandatory appeals. This group notes that since there are few defendants who will plead guilty to a capital charge, virtually every death penalty trial becomes a jury trial with all of the above requirements and expenses. These all relate to the high price taxpayers pay for the death penalty process. Harold Johnson of the Sacramento Bee argues that California would save $90 million per year if it were to abolish the death penalty. The cost issue is another standp...
