Death penalty wastes precious state money

To the Editor:

At the same time that MTSU and the rest of public higher education is preparing to fall off a cliff in terms of our state appropriation in July 2011, the state is still content to spend millions of dollars on the death penalty –a system that doesn’t help anyone.

That’s the finding reported by the Death Penalty Information Center, which concludes that states are wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on the death penalty that could be spent in other, much more productive ways.

A nationwide poll of police chiefs released with the report found that chiefs ranked the death penalty last among their priorities for crime fighting and don’t believe it is a deterrent to murder.

During the period of 1982-2005, New Jersey spent $253 million on its death penalty system –for only 10 death row inmates and zero executions– before it abolished the system in 2007. In the past 20 years, Maryland spent $186 million dollars more to prosecute capital murder cases than if the state had not sought a death sentence.

With 89 on Tennessee’s death row, five executions, and two exonerations, how much is Tennessee spending?

In 2007, the Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury testified to the legislatively created Committee to Study the Administration of the Death Penalty in Tennessee that the state has no centralized way to track such costs.

In other words, we don’t even know what we are spending. With alternatives like life in prison without parole, why are we spending precious state dollars to execute offenders rather than to educate students?

Amy Sayward
Department of history, Chair

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