State spends millions of dollars on death row inmates

Tennesseans are spending millions of tax dollars on a broken, failing system – the death penalty. According to Rev. Stacy Rector, executive director of Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty (TADP), state tax revenues could better be spent on supporting surviving families and other victims of violent crime and expanding access to mental and behavioral health services.

During a talk to the League of Women Voters of Oak Ridge recently, she mentioned a recent report by Knoxville’s WBIR-TV that cited a study released almost 20 years ago by the state comptroller’s office. According to the analysis, a death penalty trial typically costs almost 50% more than trials of defendants who receive sentences of life without parole or life with the possibility of parole.

Reasons for the higher expenses include the increased number of agencies involved, more preparation time spent by both the prosecution and defense, and more steps in the appeals process. The WBIR report also cited a 2016 study at Susquehanna University. It found that “on average death row inmates cost $1.12 million more than general population inmates.”

Rector, an ordained Presbyterian minister, said that in Tennessee the convicted murderers most likely to receive the death penalty are people of color who have low incomes, who live in certain counties (primarily, Shelby County, the location of Memphis), who have killed a white person, and who may be mentally ill.

She provided evidence that Shelby County was “among the 25 counties in the United States with the most recorded hangings without a trial of Black persons between 1807 and 1950.

"The history of lynching tracks with the locations of the people most likely to get the death penalty," Rector said.

She expressed gratitude that the Tennessee General Assembly did not pass a bill to bring back the firing squad to execute Tennesseans on death row. She added that one lawmaker “in utter seriousness asked to amend that bill to include hanging by tree.”

Not really guilty

Another problem with the death penalty, she added, is the risk of executing an innocent person.

“We just don’t get it right all the time,” she said. “Since 1972, 190 people have been released from death rows across the country after evidence of their innocence came to light. For every eight executions in the United States since 1972, we’ve let somebody go because we were wrong.”

Since 1972, she added, 67% of the individuals on death row who were later shown to be innocent were convicted partly because of “official misconduct” by the police and prosecutors. “Official misconduct was much higher in cases involving defendants of color.”

Rector said the existence of the death penalty in Tennessee exerts harmful impacts on the mental and physical health of the families of murder victims and the individuals on death row, as well as on attorneys, judges and jurors in capital trials.

“Any of us in this room could be asked to decide whether a person lives or dies based on whatever evidence happens to be presented, which we may find out later isn’t the full story,” Rector said.

She noted that three-fourths of the states have repealed the death penalty (23 states, including Virginia in 2021, the first Southern state) or not used it in the past decade (14).

The good news, she remarked, is that since 2013 only three people in Tennessee have been sentenced to death.

“The 49 people on our state’s death row were sentenced in a very different time back in the 1980s and 1990s," she said.

One of the men on death row was Pervis Payne. TADP publicized the need to get him off death row because of his intellectual disability. Thanks to the work of his lawyers and lawmakers, a court finally ruled in 2021 that he should not be executed for that reason.

According to Rector, a Vanderbilt University poll last year showed that 53% of Tennesseans support alternatives to the death penalty when given the options of the death penalty and its alternatives. Many people she has talked with agree that the death penalty does not make people safer, does not help prevent future violent crimes and does not provide better access to mental and behavioral healthcare (especially for children exposed to abuse and trauma, as usually had been the case for many on death row).

The death penalty also causes mental health problems for poorly paid staff in the Department of Corrections who must carry out executions, she said. They got a break last year because Gov. Bill Lee stopped the planned executions of five men by lethal injection. The reason: the governor became aware of violations in the protocol of testing and handling the drugs. Rector lauded the lawyer Lee hired for his excellent report on the state’s “horribly broken lethal injection situation.”

Knowing that it’s “a system in disarray,” TADP and other organizations have been pushing for transparency concerning this execution method. “We want to remove the secrecy around lethal injection in Tennessee,” Rector said. “We want to know who sells the drugs to the state, what the state pays for the drugs, where they come from and if they’re legal.”

Lee recently hired a new commissioner of corrections from the state of Arizona, Frank Strada.

“He has fought very hard to keep everything secret,” Rector said. “We are not going to give up on getting the information. If you’re going to execute people, it should be done in the light of day, so citizens of this state know what’s happening.”

She cited Radley Balko’s chilling opinion piece in the Washington Post. It gave an example of a Supreme Court ruling that “expediency and procedure trump getting to the truth (of a person’s innocence), administering actual justice and ensuring that innocent people are not executed.” In the 6-3 Shinn v. Ramirez ruling in which Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the opinion, the Supreme Court legalized “an unthinkable position.”

Even though it did not find unpersuasive the innocence claims of Barry Lee Jones, a man on Arizona’s death row, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal courts were barred from considering them, Rector said.

Balko wrote, “Every court to consider the actual merits of Barry Jones’s innocence claim has ruled that he should never have been convicted of murder. And every court to rule against Jones did so for procedural reasons without considering the new evidence. If Jones is executed, it will not be because there is overwhelming evidence of his guilt. It will be because of a technicality.”

“I feel like we’re in trouble and we’ve lost our way,” Rector concluded. “There should be no circumstance where innocence is beside the point in our justice system.”

This article originally appeared on Oakridger: State spends millions of dollars on death row inmates