To be clear, I was just pointing out that the savings aren’t coming from eliminating the death penalty, they are coming from reducing the number of appeals, and therefore increasing the likelihood that an innocent person will spend the rest of their life in prison, which is a bad thing. I’m not advocating for or against the death penalty, but I do think that a life sentence should come with just as many safeguards as a death sentence. The fact that you could release someone who was wrongfully convicted only matters if you actually allow those mistakes to be corrected.

We could use improvements at every part of the process. The appeals process however can be particularly awful, and is full of arbitrary restrictions and limitations that have little effect other than making it harder to correct mistakes and injustices. Some of them were put in place for no reason other than because politicians wanted to look tough on crime, and apparently overturning convictions looks bad for the justice system’s track record. But really I was only bringing it up because it’s relevant to the cost argument.