Cost of seeking death penalty is high in California — but the state doesn’t conduct executions
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California hasn't executed a condemned prisoner in nearly 20 years, but prosecutors continue to seek the death penalty, leading to court costs of more than $300 million in the last five years alone, an analysis by The Sacramento Bee shows.
A case in point is the prosecution of Adel Ramos. Prosecutors this week wrapped up their argument that Ramos, 51, should be put to death for his admitted ambush killing of rookie Sacramento police Officer Tara O'Sullivan in 2019. It was a shocking murder that rocked the capital region and left a trail of broken lives as O'Sullivan's family and police department colleagues struggled with grief and anger.
But even if a jury of seven women and five men agrees, Ramos, who pleaded guilty to all charges in O'Sullivan's death, would instead be sent to a high-security state prison, joining the more than 600 condemned inmates who also have been sentenced to die in a state that no longer conducts executions and has closed its Death Row .
"California is wasting enormous amounts of public money," said Robert Bacon, an Oakland-based attorney specializing in death penalty and appellate cases. Because such inmates would otherwise receive a sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole, there is no risk that they will be released to commit new offenses, meaning that the increased cost does not result in an improvement in public safety, Bacon said.
Since 2006, the last time a prisoner was executed in the state, 233 more defendants have been sentenced to die, records from the state Department of Justice show . Sixteen of them were sentenced in the five years after Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a moratorium on the death penalty in 2019 and dismantled the execution chamber at San Quentin.
The prosecutions alone have cost the state tens of millions of dollars per year, according to the Legislative Analyst's Office. When combined with the cost of appeals that inevitably follow death sentences, court costs alone were estimated to be $55 million annually in 2016, a number that would rise to $72 million per year today adjusting for inflation.
After adjusting for inflation, the court costs of pursuing death penalty convictions, along with the accompanying appeals that are required by law and can take as long as 40 years to play out, would add up to more than $313 million just in the five years since Newsom declared the moratorium, The Bee's analysis shows. It was conducted by applying each year's annual rate of inflation to the LAO's original estimate, over a period of five years.
Bacon, for example, has represented the same three convicted murderers since the 1990s as they continue to appeal their sentences. The cases began in the 1980s, before Bacon took them on, meaning that they have been accumulating court costs and attorney's fees since.
In the Ramos case, neither Sacramento County District Attorney Thien Ho nor the Sacramento Superior Court would estimate the cost of the death penalty trial, which was expected to last about three weeks. But a 2021 report by the state's Committee on Revision of the Penal Code estimated that a death penalty proceeding adds $500,000 to $1.2 million to the cost of a murder trial.
That's because even after a regular trial determining guilt or innocence is completed, a second, "penalty phase" trial must be held, with a jury, lawyers for both sides and the testimony of experts, witnesses, survivors and friends for both sides.
In 2011, a Loyola Law School study showed that jury selection alone costs $200,000 more for a capital case than one in which prosecutors sought life without parole. Today, inflation would increase those costs to $286,000, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator .
In the Ramos case, prosecutors aimed to show that O'Sullivan's death caused pain and trauma throughout her family, friends and colleagues at the Sacramento Police Department. Ramos' attorneys say he should not be sentenced to die, arguing that Ramos had an abusive and traumatic childhood that led to mental health problems.
Any cost differential is particularly instructive in this case because Ramos pleaded guilty, meaning that the only trial taking place was the one required for the death penalty. His lawyers are not asking for him to be released, but to be sentenced to life without parole.
In 2016, Californians passed Proposition 66, a ballot initiative that aimed to speed up capital prosecutions and reduce the costs of decades of appeals.
In the end, the proposition increased the number of appeals as well as the costs, the Committee on Revision of the Penal Code report said. Because the proposition required that death sentence appeals begin at the level of the original trial court, it effectively added layers of additional courts that a case must go through before it is elevated to the federal level, where still more appeals take place, the report said. A provision that state-level appeals be exhausted within five years was struck down.
The measure was also supposed to add more lawyers to help with cases, but it has not measurably done so, the report and other experts said.
It generally costs more to house a condemned inmate than an inmate sentenced to life without parole, although recent changes in California's prison system have reduced those costs considerably, experts said. Because nearly all of California inmates with capital sentences have been moved off of Death Row and placed in regular high-security prisons — such as California State Prison, Sacramento, near Folsom or Pelican Bay State Prison — the cost of housing them is not much more than the $132,000 annually that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation says it spent per capita on adult inmates in 2023.
Prosecutors say they continue to seek the death penalty despite the state's lack of follow-through for a variety of reasons, including their efforts to seek closure for the families of victims. It is also possible that a future governor would remove the moratorium, and executions could begin again.
But arguments that a death sentence will relieve stricken family members don't always hold up, said Sacramento State criminal justice professor Kim Schnurbush, because even in states where the penalty is carried out, appeals go on for decades, leaving survivors in perpetual limbo.
"I think the prosecution is still looking at it because it was such an egregious crime," Schnurbush said of the Ramos case. "I think it's a political statement."
