Kind of a srange editorial about capital punishment in the Evansville Courier & Press. It is built on the recent news story that Daniel Ray Wilkes, who killed an Evansville woman and her two daughters, has had his sentence reduced from death to life without parole. Two points are then pressed. One is that death-penalty cases are much more expensive to prosecute -- about $450,000, compared with a $42,658 average for a life-without-parole trial. The other is that, because of that expense, which county the crime is commited it determines what penalty is faced. Prosecutors in some smaller counties shy away from the death penalty because they can't afford it. Seems like this is leading to a case being made against capital punishment -- one more reason to do away with the death penalty.
But all of that leads up to this concluding paragraph:
Of course, all of these numbers don't come near adding up to the price paid by Donna Claspell and her two daughters, Avery Pike, 13, and Sydne Claspell, 8. Indeed, it is the evil incarnate posed by Wilkes and other killers that render discussions about the costs and inconsistencies of capital punishment in Indiana as merely academic, and highly unlikely to be changed, despite the flaws.
What? You took me through all that over something that is "merely academic" and "highly unlikely to be changed?" What exactly was your point? Are there so few things that are not academic and can be changed to worry about that we can waste time wallowing in this statistical slush pile? This is a think pieces that wasn't thunk through very well before the writer sat down. Yep. Been there, done that.
