Reason 4. Governments are going broke.
Across the country, governments are wrestling with tight budgets, which are likely to get tighter. Aging populations mean a rising demand for health care and retirement benefits. When more is spent to meet those commitments, less is available for everything else.

The American death-penalty system is so slow, inconsistent and inefficient that it costs far more than the life-without-parole alternative. This fact may puzzle many Americans. But think of it this way: as the country recently saw in the Tsarnaev case, a death sentence involves not one trial but two. The first procedure decides guilt or innocence, and the second weighs the proper punishment. This doubly burdensome process is followed by strict appellate review that consumes hundreds if not thousands of billable hours on the part of lawyers, clerks, investigators and judges. Compared with the cost of a complicated lawsuit, the cost of incarceration is minimal.

When I examined the cost of Florida’s death penalty many years ago, I concluded that seeing a death sentence through to execution costs at least six times as much as a life sentence. A more recent study by a federal commission pegged the difference in the costs of the trials at eight times as much. Duke University professor Philip J. Cook studied North Carolina’s system and concluded that the Tar Heel State could save $11 million per year by abolishing the death penalty. California’s system incurs excess costs estimated at some $200 million per year. From Kansas to Maryland, Tennessee to Pennsylvania, studies have all reached similar conclusions.

Rising pressure to cut wasteful spending will cause more and more legislators and law-enforcement officials to look hard at these findings—especially in a climate of low crime rates and secure prisons. It’s happening even in Texas, where Liberty County prosecutor Stephen Taylor told a reporter last year that cost is a factor in deciding whether to pursue the death penalty. “You have to be very responsible in selecting where you want to spend your money,” he said. And if Texas has reached that point, imagine what is going through the minds of governors, lawmakers and prosecutors in states that rarely see an ­execution—which is the vast majority.