For years, I’ve thought the death penalty was very bad idea. There were too many people on death row that were found innocent. I know that it costs the government more money to utilize the death penalty than it does for mere incarceration. A recent report confirmed this, and the San Jose Mercury News explained it as such:

California should either consider scrapping the death penalty or undertake drastic reforms to its costly and “dysfunctional” capital punishment system, according to a 107-page report issued today by a divided state justice commission.

While the California Commission on the Fair Administration of Justice fell short of recommending abolition of the state’s death penalty, the report painted a bleak picture of a “broken system.”

The report called for a number of reforms aimed at ridding the state of the worst death row backlog in the nation, speeding up an appellate process that drags on for decades, improving death row representation and forcing prosecutors to be more selective in the cases they choose to press for capital punishment.

“The commission was unanimous that doing nothing would be the worst possible course we could take,” said former Attorney General John Van de Kamp, who chaired the 22-member commission.

The report is the final chapter for the commission, established in 2004 to explore all aspects of California’s criminal justice system. The commission has already recommended a number of reforms that were approved by the Legislature, such as safeguards to ward off false confessions, faulty eyewitness testimony and the overuse of jailhouse informants. However, all of them were vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. (emphasis added)

Read the full article by clicking here.