A fundamentally flawed system.
The death penalty is fundamentally and irreparably flawed. Whether someone faces a death sentence has more to do with what county they’re in than what happened; the research shows that juries’ decisions are affected by the race of the accused and the deceased; and the majority of cases overturned on appeal are reversed because someone had constitutionally ineffective representation. Death is not reserved for the “worst of the worst” but for the most vulnerable.
And the system makes mistakes. Innocent people have been sentenced to death in Pennsylvania. Since the death penalty was reestablished in 1978, 13 people have been exonerated after being sentenced to death in PA, and at least three others died before their appeals could be granted. The risk of executing an innocent person isn’t just theoretical: research by the Death Penalty Policy Project found that Pennsylvania has already executed at least five innocent people.
The death penalty is dying as Pennsylvanians learn more about our system. The commonwealth hasn’t executed anyone since 1999, and it’s been more than 60 years since the commonwealth executed someone who hadn’t given up their appeals. The number of death sentences imposed each year in PA has declined significantly, and now, entire years go by without a new death sentence. More prosecutors are reluctant to bring capital charges. And juries are opting for alternative sentences to death.
Nevertheless, district attorneys across the state continue to pour tax dollars into cases that do not end in a sentence of death and even more rarely end in an execution. In 2016, the Reading Eagle did an analysis of the fiscal costs of capital punishment and concluded that, since the death penalty was reinstated in 1978, Pennsylvania taxpayers had spent more than $800 million for capital cases above and beyond what those cases would have cost had they been non-capital.
But that estimate was based just on the 408 people who have been sentenced to death since 1978. It did not account for the 95% of capital cases that end in acquittal or a sentence less than death. Since most of the costs of the death penalty are accrued before and during trial, the costs to taxpayers are far more than the Eagle estimated. And of course, the Eagle’s investigation is now a decade old.