Kansas Chief Justice Notes High Cost of Death Penalty

     As states look for ways to balance budgets in the face of overwhelming deficits, some state officials are concerned about the time and money consumed by maintaining the death penalty. During the Annual Report of the Chief Justice of the Kansas Supreme Court, Chief Justice Kay McFarland noted:

The Court also faces hearing three more death penalty appeals, which will severely strain our limited resources. So far only one such appeal has come through our Court since the reinstatement of the death penalty. This was State v. Kleypas, 272 Kan. 894, 40 P.3d 139 (2001). This case was orally argued on December 6, 2000. Prior to that, our limited research staff had spent months doing research on the issues presented taking time away from their regular work. Even with this advance preparation, a great deal more work was required. Thousands of pages of transcripts and other documents from the record were before us for review. The Kleypas opinion was filed on December 28, 2001 over a year after the case was argued before us. I have been on the Court since 1977, and no other case is even a close second to the amount of time spent on that one case. Now the Court is faced with three more death penalty appeals within the next few months.

     We have no record of how much time was spent on the Kleypas case by the Court, research staff, and clerical staff. Some indications of the increased complexity of such cases are the following figures from the Board of Indigent Defense Services (BIDS). The average non-death penalty case costs BIDS between $10,000 and $12,000. The last two death penalty cases cost BIDS over $1 million each.