老澳门开奖结果

A panel of experts, including 10 law enforcement officers and prosecutors, . To fix it, we鈥檒l need to spend over $200 million per year. The current failed system already costs over $137 million more each year than our of permanent imprisonment. Today鈥檚 report forces all Californians to ask: how much we are willing to pay for our death penalty when we have an alternative that punishes criminals and protects our communities without making us bankrupt?

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According to the 鈥� a bi-partisan blue ribbon panel created by the California Senate in 2004, which just issued the first ever 鈥� we have three options for dealing with our death penalty crisis.

First, if we decide that we simply can鈥檛 part with a system that we now know drains from public safety budgets, , harms , and is applied unfairly, then we need to commit to spending over $200 million in tax dollars every year to make the system operational on the most basic levels.

The Commission estimates that in order to make the system function, we would have to spend nearly $100 million more each year to pay for more prosecution and defense lawyers, and more court staff to handle the enormous volume of death penalty cases and appeals. When you add that to the money we already spend, it totals $217 million a year. On top of that, the State Auditor recently concluded that it will cost almost to build a new death row housing facility at San Quentin, on ground that is literally sinking into the sea.

Considering California鈥檚 , spending all of this money is not only unlikely, it鈥檚 impossible.

And none of these proposed reforms would adequately address one of the most troubling flaws in California鈥檚 death penalty, the racial and geographic disparities that call the very fairness and justice of the system into question. Despite evidence and testimony from several researchers indicating that race and play a significant role in determining who lives and who dies, proposed reforms to address these issues are noticeably lacking from the Commission鈥檚 report. Reforms that would begin to address those flaws would certainly cost more.

Our second option, according to the Commission, is to acknowledge that we have the most extreme death penalty statute in the country, resulting in an insupportably large death row population, and that we can鈥檛 afford a system this big and bloated.

We all agree that we want a criminal justice system that delivers justice fairly. The overwhelming demands of , however, overburden courts, lawyers and public safety officials at every level, jeopardizing the foundations of our justice system. The Commission suggests that we could limit the number of crimes eligible for the death penalty in order to ease some of the burden. This would still cost more than $100 million a year, depending on how much smaller we make the 鈥渟maller death penalty.鈥�

While both of these options provide a healthy dose of reality about how large and unmanageable our death penalty is, the Commission report also highlights the fact that we already pay on the current failed death penalty, and that a cheaper, more effective system is not only feasible, .

Few people realize that condemning someone to costs California taxpayers millions of dollars less than sentencing him or her to death. We have had the option of for as long as we have had the death penalty, and it鈥檚 proven itself to be a more functional system that serves as a severe, but cost effective, punishment.

Which brings us to our third option, according to the Commission: , and save millions of dollars for public safety programs that actually work to punish criminals, protect the public and help victims. This would cost us less than $12 million, a savings of more than $200 million a year over option one.

The Commission does not come out and officially endorse this or any other option. In some sense, that鈥檚 a cop out. On the other hand, the Commission puts the decision right where it should be: in the hand of the voters. It鈥檚 time for those of us who are writing the checks to fund the system if to ask if it鈥檚 really worth the price.

To read the Commission鈥檚 report, visit:

Learn more at .