Why waste resources on one who has proven themselves to be the worst kind of man? He won't learn a lesson. He doesn't deserve an opportunity to ever rejoin society. Your suggestion is to house, feed and provide medicine for this monster for the rest of his life. To give him what millions of Americans can not obtain. You want to reward his actions.
The death penalty is not revenge. It's not a lesson.It should not be seen as some deterrent. It's culling a sick animal so it can't do any more harm to the rest of the population. It can be done quickly, humanely, and even cleanly though the cheapest method would make a small, containable mess.
There's no good summary that I found in my five mins of research, and a lot of it came from https://deathpenaltyinfo.org, which appears to be a very biased nonprofit against the death penalty.
But the info seems consistent all around. It costs more because since it's such a big deal for the state to kill somebody, the legal costs skyrocket dramatically. Hence, it's more expense.
Again, 5 minutes of research. Somebody correct me. It still smells a bit funny if this cost is lifetime of the prisoner vs someone who has life in prison for multiple decades.
The costs come from years if not decades of appeals that are legally required after someone is sentenced to death, among other things like the cost of the chemicals used for lethal injection.
Factually, the anti death penalty advocates are correct about the expense argument, but it's largely of their own doing because they're the ones who imposed those expenses on the government by pushing for such laws. They literally largely made it a problem.
That is not and never has been the reason for capital punishment. The kind of people who should be executed are not doing the kind of crimes that are deterred. The point is to remove the individual who is not compatible with society.
I don't necessarily disagree with the reasons behind your conclusion, but it costs more to execute a prisoner than to house them for life. The nature of the death penalty means that every appeal must be heard and fought through, which is one reason why it takes so long to kill them after conviction. All of those people involved in that process are thus being dragged away from other things they could be doing.
About the only time an execution occurs quickly is if the individual decides not to appeal. Rare, understandably. The other option would be to ignore the appeals process, and frankly we have already executed too many innocents for any person, even those who believe in the death penalty, to believe that would be justice.
Do you think it's a waste of resources to even give him a trial? Death penalty trials are long and expensive and often cost more than lifelong incarceration. You might be okay with a low bar for having the government remove someone from society but I think the bar should be high, and the decision shouldn't be done lightly. However, keeping that bar high also takes more resources so the issue isn't as easy as you make it out to be.
Americans not being able to obtain housing and the rising homelessness does not mean we should employ capital punishment, which is an expensive and inhumane procedure where there is a chance to take away the life of those potentially innocent, not to mention that it doesn't actually reduce or deter crime. In fact, it seems that places with more capital punishment have more violent crime.
Only because the methods employed are stupidly wasteful and overcomplicated. The process needs to be overhauled in a logical and pragmatic way. The problem with current means of execution is that feelings were brought into the equation in the first place.