Should We Abolish The Death Penalty to Save Money?

Read this and then I'll comment:

The idea of abolishing the death penalty in Colorado and using the money it takes to prosecute such cases to solve so-called cold cases stirred debate in a House committee late into the night Monday.

House Majority Leader Paul Weissmann, D-Louisville, revived his bill that just missed passing the House in 2007. The threat of death does not deter people from committing murders, he said, and the $370,000 spent to prosecute those cases could be better spent on investigating unsolved murders.

Since 1967, Colorado has executed one person and there are only two people on death row, Weissmann said. During that time, there have been 1,435 unsolved homicides.

Since the early 1980s, the national clearance rate for murder cases has dropped from 80 percent to 62 percent, said University of Colorado sociology professor Michael Radelet, who has written seven books on the death penalty.

California has hundreds of inmates on death row at a staggering cost every year for appeals, lawyer fees, etc. It can take 15-20 years before an execution takes place...if ever. Because of the interminable delays involved, I personally doubt that the death penalty is much of a deterrant anymore. Although I'm not quite convinced that eliminating it would be best, I'm willing to give it more consideration.

We either need to dramatically reform the process so that there's an obvious connection between the crime, conviction and execution, or we need to dump it and use the money saved to build more prisons or as the story suggests above, to try and clear more cases. What we're doing now clearly doesn't work.