Fighting the Death Penalty: A Fifty-Year Journey of Argument and Persuasion by Wanger Eugene G

Author:Wanger, Eugene G. [Wanger, Eugene G.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781628962864
Publisher: Michigan State University Press

WILLIAM KIME is an independent corrections consultant and former Deputy Director, Michigan Department of Corrections. EUGENE WANGER, E SQ. is the author of Michigan’s constitutional prohibition of the death penalty and Co-Chairman of the Michigan Committee Against Capital Punishment.

Michigan Catholic Conference FOCUS, vol. 21, no. 2 April 1993.

17. Michigan Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on the Death Penalty

Oakland Community College

September 8, 1994

TESTIMONY OF EUGENE G. WANGER

My name is Eugene G. Wanger. I am co-chairman, with Tom Downs, of the Michigan Committee Against Capital Punishment. I am the author of our state’s Constitutional prohibition of the death penalty.

Michigan, by statute in 1846, was the first government in the English-speaking world to abolish capital punishment for murder and lesser crimes. Our state has never restored it. Since 1964 our state Constitution has prohibited it. It would be a tragedy of international consequence to restore it now.

Thirty years ago the Michigan Constitutional Convention passed that death penalty prohibition with only three dissenting votes, calling this step “. . . a significant contribution to the concept of civilized justice, which all of us seek to serve.”

What has changed since then? Certainly not the facts about what the death penalty is and what it does. Mountains of evidence show that the nature of the death penalty remains the same.

Nothing in current experience restores the widely discredited argument that executions deter capital crimes against either citizens in general or against law enforcement and corrections personnel. What is evident, however, is that the death penalty has brought the states which have it serious problems with cost and the efficiency of their law enforcement operations. It is also clear that the risk of executing the innocent remains unabated.

Cost. It is now widely recognized that the death penalty carries a much higher price tag than life imprisonment. This is because capital cases must be treated much differently than ordinary prosecutions and trials to comply with Supreme Court rulings. In practice, they take more than three times as long to conclude. They involve extensive pre-trial motions, elaborate background investigations, and numerous expert witnesses whose considerable fees on both sides of the case are usually funded by the taxpayer. In addition, attorney fees are much higher in capital cases and a separate, often longer, trial must be held after conviction to determine the sentence. Then review at the state Supreme Court level is mandatory, and there are likely to be several levels of appeal and retrial. That this costly process always takes years may be fortunate, in view of the cases in which enough time elapsed for the exoneration of innocent persons before they were executed.

In addition, the housing of death row inmates is a major cost factor. Staff-intensive, super-secure facilities cost much more to build and run than general population prisons in which most “lifers” are housed. In fact, death row costs alone can be greater than the expense of maintaining a prisoner for life.

The total dollar cost of this process is staggering, ranging from at least $600,000.00 to more than $2 million per case.

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