Seeking the death penalty for accused Idaho killer Bryan Kohberger could end up costing taxpayers an additional $1million, if he is convicted.
The Latah County Prosecutors’ Office informed the court in late June that they would seek the death penalty because the killings were ‘especially heinous, atrocious or cruel, manifesting exceptional depravity.’
Convicted killers on death row typically rack up significant medical bills as they await execution for decades – all at the expense of taxpayers, plus the cost of their eventual execution.
According to the Idaho Statesman, Gerald Pizzuto, a 67-year-old death row inmate who has been on death row in Idaho since 1986, has cost taxpayers $1.3million, largely in medical costs for a slew of conditions.
The state’s longest-serving death row inmate has been held for more than 40 years, running up a $1.5million tab.
Furthermore, legal delays and a shortage of lethal injections have kept killers on death row for an even longer time, prompting Idaho to bring back the firing squad earlier this year.
This is entirely the result of the stupid way we carry out the death penalty.
We fuck around for decades before we execute someone. The two examples they use have been on death row for 37 and 40 years.
That’s bullshit.
Here is my proposal.
After a death penalty sentence, the convicted is given one year to gather any new exculpatory evidence or evidence of a mistrial. A panel of judges does an automatic review of the original trial. If there is nothing new that can challenge the original conviction, the execution is carried out the next day.
Death is achieved by a massive overdose of fentanyl from DEA impound. Fentanyl seized from drug traffickers. A good bust will capture enough fentanyl to kill millions, there is more than enough in inventory.
It’s painless. The condemned will pass out, stop breathing, and die.
No money spent on drugs and no extended prison sentence. Problem solved.
Works for me.
Thank the touchy feely liberals. Great idea guy!
If we’re going to use lethal injection, seems to me it’s well past time to modernize the cocktail. Or, being back the gas chamber but just do a pure nitrogen purge for 5 to 10 minutes.
Trouble with inert gas is, it leaves you with a technically dead body (remarkably quickly), but… it’s a dead body with nothing medically wrong with it. There’s a distressingly long window during which the corpse could be reanimated, with increasing degrees of zombification, before it’s really most sincerely dead.
So make it a combination gas chamber and decapitron. Heartbeat stops, 10 second pause, SCHNIP! All automated.
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(Yeah, we are starting to rewatch Lexx. How could you tell? 😉 )
Then display the head on a pike: bonus!
Ya know, 15 years ago I would have agreed whole heartedly. Now, I think we’ve all seen how often the state gets it wronng and how overzealous prosecutors or departments get a hard on for someone.
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If I could trust the state to do anything right I might agree, but I cnst even trust the state and its functionaries to do the most basic and menial of tasks correctly. And it is only going to get worse with more automation; get ready for the future where an AI at the DMV decides some piece of info and the hell that will be to correct.
Hm. Gordon R. Dickson’s story, “Computers Don’t Argue” comes to mind….