The reason it's more expensive is twofold: 1) The number of years the person stays in jail (between 20k and 40k a year, depending on state) and 2) the legal fees.
If the process is altered to reduce the avg number of years a person stays on deathrow before being killed by 10, that's 200-400k a year, per person, that's being saved.
Legal fees are so expensive because inmates are allowed to get non-state paid lawyers, and because the process drags on as much as it does. Now, i don't want to limit the number of appeals the prisoner currently has, only the time in which they can present them. Currently you can wait a number of years between each appeal, and they do, to give themselves more time. My suggestion is that all appeals must be filed within say, 3 years of the sentencing, and they can fit them into the court schedule as needed, even if that takes MORE than 3 years.
So they just have to file all their appeals within 3 years, and then let the courts take say 5 or 10 years to hear all of them.
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