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the data bear them out, they contend—for example, by showing a decline in murders in the wake of executions—their assumptions must be correct.
    At the end of the day, the best I could say was this: If the death penalty is a deterrent, that fact is not visible to the naked eye. When you are asking citizens to capitulate to their government’s right to kill them, you’d better be able to show them something they can understand in their own terms. Econometric models and regression analyses cannot possibly contribute much to the debate.
    There is, of course, another economic argument made in behalf of the death penalty: it saves public funds, because the state does not have to provide lifetime support to an incarcerated killer. But in this, like so many other things, lawyers have a huge impact on costs.
    In the United States in 2000, the average period between conviction and execution was eleven and a half years, with lawyers and courts spewing out briefs and decisions all that time. Public funds pay for almost all of this, since capital offenses are most often committed by the poor whose defenses are usually maintained at the cost of the state. There is a lot to pay for. Two lawyers at trial, one on appeal, another for the post-conviction proceedings, another for the habeas . And there must be prosecutors to oppose them, cops and other investigators to put the case in shape for trial, judges to hear the matter, probation officers, mitigation experts, usually a couple of shrinks, court reporters, and transcripts. And none of this considers the costs of incarceration while the convicted defendant is awaiting execution. Those on death row in Illinois and a number of other states are most often held in single cells, since a man with nothing to lose doesn’t make an especially good roommate when you aggravate him. Given all those costs, researchers seem to agree that imposing the death penalty is more expensive than leaving a killer alive. A new study published in 2003, which was conducted by the gubernatorial commission in Indiana, concluded that in present values, the costs in death penalty cases exceed the total price of life without parole by more than a third.
    Yet cost, I decided ultimately, is basically a red herring. Certainly cost savings don’t justify capital punishment. But they do not provide a compelling argument against it, either, in most states. Capital prosecutions are relatively rare. There have been roughly ten to fifteen new death sentences in Illinois every year. Even if we imagine that the costs in those cases exceed those in a non-capital case by a million or even two million dollars, the most grandiose number used by death penalty opponents, the amount saved by abolition is small in terms of a $52.5 billion state budget. The money spent on the death penalty may have high symbolic value, but curtailing that expenditure is certainly not enough to give us a tax cut or better schools.
    After two years of reading studies, I decided I wasn’t going to find any definitive answers to the merits—or failings—of the death penalty in the realm of social science.

10
MORAL PROPORTION: ULTIMATE PUNISHMENT FOR ULTIMATE EVIL
    O N THE COMMISSION , we spent little time in philosophical debates. We were warm with one another and our discussions wandered at times, but we were busy people gathered for a serious purpose and we had no illusions we could change each other’s minds. Yet to the extent that incidental exchanges occasionally got to the heart of the issue, those who favored capital punishment (and that included some of us who, at other moments, were against it, too) tended to make one argument again and again: Sometimes a crime is so horrible that killing its perpetrator is the only correct response. When everything is said and done, I suspect that the argument for what I refer to as “moral proportion” remains the principal reason why more Americans continue to support