Utah Wants Answers About the Cost of Capital Punishment

Utah is pissed. They have figured out that capital punishment is just to damn expensive and who can afford to waste money in this day and age?
Usually Utah has about 10 death penalty cases a year. Those 10 cases alone  cost the state approximately $690,800 over and above the projected legal costs if they were prosecuted without the death penalty. They also cost local governments an estimated $460,000 per year for prosecutors and public defenders.

"Capital cases were 0.0008 percent of my total caseload, but yet it was probably 10 percent of my budget,"  said Patrick Anderson, of the Salt Lake Legal Defenders Association. "That’s just talking about the trial. That’s not the appellate aspect of it."

Why on earth would anyone knowingly do something so horrendously stupid?

The state representatives realize how asinine this is but they also realize how people get caught up in the specifics of the case and decide that death is the only solution. We all know that human beings are fickle and frail beings ruled by emotion. Can we really sit around and watch our own economy go down the toilet so we can kill someone?

It's expensive. It's irreversible. It's morally questionable for many reasons (and not just the obvious one). It's not a deterrent and it is often the worst form of racial discrimination. 

Seriously, people.