from the Los Angeles Times
California unveiled a new method for executing condemned prisoners Friday, proposing a single-drug lethal injection protocol that could restart capital punishment after a 10-year hiatus.
More than 30 states and the federal government use lethal injection as their primary method of carrying out executions, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a group that has been critical of the way capital punishment has been administered. Eight states have used a single-drug method for executions, while six others have announced plans to do so.
The proposed California regulation estimates the cost of a single execution to be just under $187,000, with more than $97,000 of that expected to go to crowd control outside San Quentin State Prison, where executions take place.
Each execution costs $187,000? Of taxpayer money? For EACH execution? Really? China puts the condemned person in front of a firing squad, shoots them dead, and then sends the bill for the bullets to the family of the executed person. Cost = 0. How about hanging? Maybe we could bring back hanging. Hanging worked in the Old West. The person got caught committing a death-penalty crime and they took him out and hung him. Hanging is time and cost effective - all you need is a jury, a rope and a tree.
Or we could continue to spend $90,000 a year to keep each condemned person on death row until the state kills them, decades later, at an additional cost of $187,000. Hmm.
