Utah bucking U.S. death penalty trend

While many states are trading the death penalty for life sentences to save millions in tax dollars, the Utah Attorney General's Office is pushing to strengthen the state's ultimate punishment by limiting the appeals process.

"No one gets executed unless they volunteer for it," said Paul Murphy, spokesman for the attorney general's office, about Utah's decades-long appeal process. "It's a legal fiction," he said wryly.

The last person Utah executed, Joseph Mitchell Parsons in 1999, waited on death row for only 11 years. But about half of Utah's current 10 death-row inmates have successfully appealed their respective executions for more than 20 years.

That's apparently a few years too long for Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, who loudly supported a recent failed resolution to amend the Utah Constitution to limit appeals.

"We could realistically shave off at least five years of litigations and maybe more," said Tom Brunker, Utah's capital case coordinator in the Utah Attorney General's Office.

But considering how funds are divvied for capital cases, whittling off a few years from a person's prison time won't save state taxpayers much money compared with what they've already likely spent throughout the lengthy appeals process.

Capital prosecutors, like Brunker and his specialized legal team, will still receive their near-six-digit salary no matter how many — or few — criminals are convicted to die. And the state Legislature will still dole out a one-time approximate $80,000 to each convicted killer for court fees, as long as the sentence remains.

But $80,000 is at least $1 million short of what's traditionally needed for proper legal representation, according to Kent Hart, assistant federal defender with the Capital Habeas Unit of the Utah Federal Defender Office — essentially a public defender for death-row inmates.

Hart says he opposes the death penalty on moral grounds, but he's stunned that taxpayers would pay more — sometimes millions of dollars more — to execute someone when they could simply tuck them away for life for half the cost.

"Spending the rest of your life (in prison) is a much worse punishment anyway," Hart said.