The Cost of the Death Penalty in Maryland - Urban Institute

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These estimates include pre-trial, guilt/innocence, penalty, appellate, post-conviction and other post-sentencing phases. During the pre-trial and trial phases, attorney preparation time for capital and non-capital cases outside the courtroom increases as the trial date approaches. We estimate preparation for an appeal in a non-capital case consumes about one-half the time of a capital appeal. In terms of post-conviction, we again estimate out-of-court preparation time increases as the postconviction hearing date approaches. Time consumption for other post-sentencing proceedings is assumed equivalent to preparation for hearings in the pre-trial phase. Estimates for the prosecution are identical to that of the defense except for appeals. The justification is that the prosecution spends less time responding to an appeal than the defense does because the defense must identify grounds for the appeal, while the prosecution need only respond to the particular issues raised by the defense. Days in which there was a hearing or a trial day were assumed to have taken 100% of an attorney’s time. Thus, we account for, on the average, the amount of time an attorney spends each day working on a case as well as the extra time associated with observed trial events. The Cost of the Death Penalty in Maryland 39
APPENDIX B – CONSTRUCTION OF CASE-LEVEL COST ESTIMATES This Appendix describes how case-level estimates were constructed. A description of how Maryland cases proceed through a capital eligible case can be found in the main body of the report. OVERVIEW In this study, we count the opportunity cost of the death penalty, which is defined as the value of resources in their next best use. Resources take the form of capital (such as the value of court space) and labor costs (salary and wages). We estimate the value of each resource (the price) in terms of the price per unit (such as one hour of attorney time). We estimate the value of all resources paid for by Maryland taxpayers in the processing of a death eligible case. We estimate costs for each defendant, and for each stage of case processing. 19 Costs are calculated as the product of a price of a unit of input (such as hours) and the quantity of inputs used. Thus, our basic cost equation is: Cost= Price of unit of input X Quantity of inputs (A2.1) Following (A2.1), we estimate the two components of cost, price and quantity, separately. For instance, we observe the price of an hour of an attorney’s time, then multiply that by the number of hours spent by that attorney in each stage of case processing. The remainder of this Appendix describes the sources of the price and quantity estimates. Each of the sections in this Appendix follows the same order of presentation. PRE-TRIAL/ TRIAL/ PENALTY PHASE Defense Cost The Office of the Public Defender’s (OPD) primary mission is to provide legal representation to indigent defendants in the State of Maryland. The responsibility of establishing and funding county-level Offices of the Public Defender rests, not on the individual counties, but under the Executive branch of the Government of the State of Maryland. 19 Because we are comparing trial costs of capital cases and non-capital cases, we dropped from our comparison group cases which were acquitted. Given that these cases could not possibly receive the same cost inputs as the treatment group, including them would have deflated the cost of the comparison group and artificially raised the differential cost of death penalty as compared to cases which did not receive the death penalty. The Cost of the Death Penalty in Maryland 40
Page 1 and 2: The Cost of the Death Penalty in Ma
Page 3 and 4: ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS We would like to t
Page 5 and 6: TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.
Page 7 and 8: prosecuted cases may have been more
Page 9 and 10: THE COST OF THE DEATH PENALTY IN MA
Page 11 and 12: Table 1. Results of published studi
Page 13 and 14: sentence at $4.46 million (not incl
Page 15 and 16: Figure 1. Death Penalty Case Proces
Page 17 and 18: During the penalty trial for a capi
Page 19 and 20: Maryland Court of Special Appeals.
Page 21 and 22: The Maryland Judiciary Case Search
Page 23 and 24: notice. However, given that a death
Page 25 and 26: models to generate the propensity s
Page 27 and 28: Table 3. Descriptive Statistics Dea
Page 29 and 30: length of phase at every stage of t
Page 31 and 32: we add the propensity score estimat
Page 33 and 34: Cases receiving a death notices are
Page 35 and 36: costs over the duration of a case.
Page 37 and 38: REFERENCES American Bar Association
Page 39 and 40: Paternoster, Raymond et al. (2003).
Page 41 and 42: case management system. In many cas
Page 43: espondents, who we also contacted.
Page 47 and 48: To estimate the hourly wage rate to
Page 49 and 50: eport that the amount of time prepa
Page 51 and 52: Table A2.8 Estimated Hourly Wage Ra
Page 53 and 54: Table A2.10 Rental Value of Circuit
Page 55 and 56: PENALTY PHASE COSTS The penalty pha
Page 57 and 58: COST OF CASE REVIEW We differentiat
Page 59 and 60: Reporter and $34.78 for a Deputy Sh
Page 61 and 62: level, we observed the number of ap
Page 63 and 64: log-log relationship between prison
Page 65 and 66: APPENDIX C - ECONOMETRIC MODELS Sta
Page 67 and 68: twenty-four variables, indicating t
Page 69: in Stage 2 and represents the proba

The Cost of the Death Penalty in Maryland - Urban Institute

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