Cost of justice proves high

Research shows capital cases costly, but families seeking closure pay real price.

By STEVEN MAYER
Californian staff writer
e-mail: smayer@bakersfield.com

Dan Ocampo / The Californian Robert Mincy, with great-grandson Alexander Valenzuela, visits son Steven Mincy’s grave in Garden Grove.

There is little agreement about the number of dollars Californians spend -- from arrest to execution -- on death penalty cases.

But research indicates capital punishment sucks significantly more tax dollars from state coffers than does simple imprisonment.

A 1988 report by The Sacramento Bee estimated the state could save $90 million each year by abolishing capital punishment.

More than a decade later, in 1999, the Joint Legislative Budget Committee of the California Legislature heard similar estimates when its legislative analyst, Elizabeth G. Hill, advised the committee that elimination of the death penalty "would probably result in net savings to the state of at least several tens of millions of dollars annually and net savings to local governments in the millions to tens of millions of dollars on a statewide basis."

Byron Tucker, Gov. Gray Davis' spokesman on death penalty issues, said California voters have been clear in their desire to retain the death penalty as a part of the state's overall system of justice. And while the cost of sustaining capital punishment is high, Tucker said, so is the emotional cost to the families of victims.

"It's important to recognize the impact the loss of a loved one has on victims' families," Tucker said. "Justice for the victims' families has to be a consideration in any discussion of cost."

Politicians and political staffers say there is a dearth of comprehensive, studies that track the costs of prosecuting, defending, imprisoning, counseling, transporting and executing condemned prisoners in California.

Nevertheless, studies in other states tend to support Hill's assertion that maintaining a system of capital punishment is more expensive than keeping murderers in prison for life.

A report issued by the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C. said in 1992 that the death penalty in Texas cost taxpayers a per-case average of $2.3 million, significantly more than imprisoning someone in a maximum-security cell for 40 years. In Florida, the cost of execution was even higher, according to the study.

"Easily, the cost of a death penalty case is two or three times the cost of a non-capital murder case," said Lance Lindsay, executive director of Death Penalty Focus, an anti-death penalty organization based in California.

But capital punishment advocates dispute such assertions.

Justice For All, a Houston-based criminal justice reform and victims' rights organization, estimated in a 1997 report that life-without-parole cases would cost significantly more than equivalent death penalty cases over the lifetime of a prisoner.

Paying the freight

All male prisoners on condemned status are held at San Quentin State Prison. Females are housed at the Central California Women's Facility at Chowchilla.

The average cost to house an inmate in California's prison system is about $25,600 per year, according to the California Department of Corrections. But incarceration on Death Row, with its maximum-security, single-inmate cells costs much more -- running about $33,000 per inmate per year, said Margot Bach, a department spokeswoman.

That means taxpayers in Kern County and California have probably spent close to three-quarters of a million dollars keeping David Leslie Murtishaw behind bars since his arrest in the shooting deaths of three college students in the Mojave Desert in 1978.

Other prisoners on Death Row also are approaching the million-dollar mark in the cost of their incarceration.

Nearly half of the convicted murderers on California's Death Row have been there for more than 10 years, and about 150 have been on "the Row" for 15 years or more, according to a state roster of condemned prisoners.

These are statistics that leave some families of murder victims feeling powerless and galled by the apparent impotence of the state's system of capital punishment.

"I've been bitter about it," said Robert Mincy, the 67-year-old father of Steve Mincy, a young man murdered in Kern County in 1989.

Paul Clarence Bolin was sentenced in 1991 for shooting to death Mincy's son and another man and wounding a third. Bolin's appeals have rattled around in the state Supreme Court for more than eight years -- and there's no end in sight.

Mincy said he was told by a state prosecutor that Bolin's case could be locked up in the courts for another 10 years. He and his wife, Donna, are afraid they will not live long enough to witness the execution of their son's killer.

Donna Mincy said she doesn't want to witness it personally -- but just knowing of Bolin's execution would bring her a sense of closure.

"But we're getting old and my husband is not in the best of health," Donna Mincy said recently. "I could rest easy knowing he paid the price for what he did."

In a sense, California is paying both the high cost associated with capital punishment appeals and the high cost of incarceration associated with life imprisonment. By maintaining the death penalty on the books, yet rarely taking it to its ultimate conclusion, California taxpayers have been paying double duty.

Jon Coupal, president of the Sacramento-based Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, says California taxpayers have long shown a willingness to pay a relatively high cost to maintain a justice system that includes capital punishment -- within reasonable limits.

Coupal called for reforms to streamline the court process, and suggested the deterrent effect of the death penalty saves the state the cost of additional crimes.

"How do you put a price on the form of justice you want?" Coupal said. "It's hard to quantify whether it's worth it from a taxpayer's perspective. Maybe it's a bargain."

Costly fixes

A huge chunk of the overall state cost is related to court reviews, those mandated by the Legislature as well as the appeal procedures initiated by the convicted inmates' legal staffs. These costs vary depending upon the resources of the convicted inmate and the length of the court procedures.

But any way you slice it, California's contemporary system of capital punishment is expensive.

California courts typically spend $1 million per capital case, including the trial and the state portion of the appeal, far more than many other states, said California Supreme Court Chief Justice Ronald George.

And the number of death penalty cases keeps rising.

In 1988, California housed 249 condemned prisoners on Death Row. That number has more than doubled in the past dozen years, ramping up past 600 for the first time this year. More death sentences require more prison cells, more court time, more lawyers, more investigation fees and more money.

From 1988 through last year, an average of about 27 new prisoners were locked up on California's Death Row each year. If that trend continues, costs will continue to rise as still more condemned prisoners require ever more costly services.

Even attempts to "fix" the system have added to the taxpayers' burden.

In the late 1990s, capital punishment-related costs to the state increased when the Legislature authorized the creation of the California Habeas Corpus Resource Center in an attempt to ease the bottleneck of capital cases.

The center represents some death row inmates and provides training for private attorneys in death penalty cases.

Officially part of the state judiciary, the creation of the center was aimed at moving capital cases through the state system more efficiently. Although the approximately two-dozen lawyers the center employed could not unclog the bottleneck, they did keep the backlog from getting worse.

More cost increases came in 1997 and 1998 when legislation authorized an increase in the hourly rate for capital defense attorneys from $98 per hour to $125. The legislation also gave the state public defender's office 15 more lawyers.

Last year, the habeas center had an $8 million budget to pay for lawyers, paralegals, investigators and training programs. More attorneys are expected to be hired, bringing the total to about 30.

As of fall 1999, expenditures by the state Department of Justice, the Office of the State Public Defender, the Habeas Corpus Resource Center and the Court-Appointed Counsel program for the costs of litigating capital punishment appeals stood at about $35 million annually, according to legislative analyst Hill's report.

For Robert and Donna Mincy, debate about the cost of the death penalty and protection of Death Row prisoners' rights rings hollow.

They point to evidence presented at trial that Bolin, their son's killer, beat a man with a pipe in 1979 and shot another man in the chest with a shotgun in 1981, long before being convicted of Steve Mincy's murder in 1990.

They note in resigned and weary horror that their son was said to have begged for his life in the moments preceding his death.

They say their family has been shattered by the 12-year-old crime. They say Bolin is an evil man whose history of violence shows him to be deserving of execution -- cost be damned.

"I went a year later to the place where Steve was shot," Donna Mincy said. "God, I hate to think of him dying there alone.

"We were a normal family with normal problems," she said after a moment. "I don't think we will ever be the same."