The last person executed in Louisiana was a volunteer — Gerald Bordelon. He waived his right to appeal and begged the state to end his life. Louisiana obliged. At the age of 47, Bordelon was executed by lethal injection.

Bordelon’s unique “voluntary” execution was more than eight years ago. It’s been more than 16 years, however, since the Pelican State’s last “nonvoluntary” execution.

Louisiana is unlikely to end its execution hiatus anytime soon. This is because the state lacks a legal execution method. Yet there are more than 70 individuals currently languishing on Louisiana’s death row, and more are being added each year. Meanwhile, taxpayers are footing the bill for capital punishment’s significant costs.

These issues highlight the pervasive dysfunction present in Louisiana’s death penalty system. The state sentences people to die; Louisianans cover the legal costs associated with capital punishment; but the condemned cannot be executed — they simply live out their lives on death row. The current state of affairs clearly merits a deeper legislative discussion, and while the Legislature has previously considered reforms, it has frequently opted to maintain the status quo.

As it currently stands, Louisiana’s death penalty system is an arcane labyrinth of legal proceedings. While the state’s criminal justice system generally includes legal safeguards intended to protect the rights of the accused, capital cases involve what’s known as “super due process.” These are additional safeguards that are beyond those required in ordinary criminal cases, and they are part of the reason why the death penalty is so expensive. Capital cases are subject to more pretrial motions, trials and appeals, and the cost of housing someone on death row is substantial as well. All of these added expenses can drain state coffers of millions of dollars.

While no one has ever conducted a thorough cost study in Louisiana, every state that has performed a comprehensive review of its system has discovered that the capital punishment program costs far more than life-without-parole, called LWOP — even when you factor in end-of-life health care. Studies in Maryland and North Carolina, for example, concluded that when compared to similar noncapital cases, each death penalty case easily costs around $1 million to $2 million more. Even though Louisiana does not currently execute the condemned, it’s clear that the state is spending extraordinary sums to keep capital punishment on life support.

If Louisiana possessed a legal execution method and resumed executions, research suggests that its system would still suffer from serious flaws. The cost of capital punishment would continue to outweigh that of LWOP because the expensive, mandated legal proceedings — not the execution method — drive up the death penalty’s expense. And despite the high price tag of the legal safeguards associated with capital cases, the prospect of accidentally killing an innocent person can never be fully eliminated.

This risk is especially worth noting in Louisiana. When considering all crimes, Louisiana currently has one of the nation’s worst wrongful conviction records. This error rate, coupled with the death penalty’s finality, spells serious trouble.

Louisiana’s death penalty-specific numbers are even more troubling. The Pelican State has executed 28 inmates since 1983, but it has also wrongly convicted and released 11 individuals from death row. That’s a poor record by any measure.

It’s impossible to know how many innocent people are on Louisiana’s death row today. However, a 2014 study estimates that nationwide, up to 4 percent of individuals sentenced to die are not guilty. If Louisiana resumes executions, innocent lives could be at risk.

Regardless of these expenses and dangers, everyday Louisianans are not benefiting from capital punishment. An academic examination of all deterrence studies concluded that no credible evidence exists to show that the death penalty has any general deterrent value. In fact, the region that executes the most inmates — the South — consistently has higher murder rates than other regions. Capital punishment simply doesn’t appear to affect homicide rates.

There are currently no less than 11 individuals awaiting trial for capital offenses in Louisiana. If prosecutors ultimately seek and obtain death sentences in those cases, this could spark an expensive, decades-long process in which there are no winners. Rather than pursuing these punishments and maintaining the death penalty’s status quo, lawmakers should return to the drawing board.

There are three possible paths that legislators can take. They could work to resume executions. But they’d need to embrace the ever-present threat of executing an innocent person and the corresponding high costs. They could also attempt to reform the death penalty. But, as other states have discovered, every reform either makes capital punishment more expensive or riskier. These reforms never result in both a less expensive and safer system.

Lastly, lawmakers could replace the death penalty with a cheaper, less-risky maximum sentence that also protects the general public — LWOP. Objectively speaking, the answer seems clear.

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