New execution chamber an outrageous boondoggle

In a historic vote May 20, the Nebraska Legislature abolished the state’s death penalty. The vote was based on concerns about the high cost of capital punishment and a protracted appeals process that prevents families of murder victims from reaching closure. Nebraska is the first “red” state to repeal capital punishment, but Republicans have been leading efforts to repeal capital punishment in at least a half-dozen states.

Regrettably, on the same day in Carson City, and in stark contrast to Nebraska’s conservative Legislature, conservative members of both houses of Nevada’s Legislature voted to spend almost $1 million to build an unneeded new execution chamber. Considering the other vital needs of our state that are much higher priorities, this boondoggle is an outrageous waste of taxpayer money.

In 2011, when the Legislature voted to close the Nevada State Prison in Carson City, the Department of Corrections assured lawmakers that the chamber would remain available should an execution be scheduled. Nonetheless, in 2013, the governor’s budget included a proposed “remodel” project to construct a new execution chamber at the prison in Ely at a cost of $760,000. However, the Department of Corrections acknowledged that the existing chamber was still functional and available if an execution were to be scheduled, and the expensive project was wisely and unanimously rejected. Unfortunately, conservative Nevada legislators imprudently approved the construction of an execution chamber that is unlikely to ever be used.

The constitutionality of lethal injection is being litigated in the courts, and no executions are scheduled in Nevada, with the last one occurring almost 10 years ago. This proposed new facility may sit unused forever, or it could require further remodeling if lethal injection is rejected in court. Even if lethal injection is upheld, there are serious doubts about the availability of the lethal drugs needed for an execution.

Building an execution chamber in Ely to replace the one in Carson City will increase the cost of carrying out executions in Nevada because it will mean transporting many people (victims and official witnesses, the director of the Department of Corrections and others) at least 250 miles to remote Ely. Transporting one individual (the inmate) from death row in Ely to Carson City is much less expensive. Furthermore, the project is to be funded by new bonds, which means the state will incur almost $1 million in debt and taxpayers will be paying the interest on that debt via their property taxes for up to 20 years. This $1 million in debt also reduces the amount of money that is available for maintenance of existing buildings.

An additional concern about building the chamber in Ely is that it makes it less accessible to the press and to the government institutions that should be monitoring its overall operation.

This is not a policy decision about whether to have the death penalty in Nevada — that is for another day. This is a basic budgetary issue: whether we should spend close to a million dollars to construct a new and unnecessary execution chamber. A cost audit of Nevada’s death penalty recently concluded that we spend at least twice as much money prosecuting a death penalty homicide case as prosecuting a non-death penalty homicide case.

Republicans in Nevada voted to add to the cost of maintaining the death penalty in Nevada, something that will be hard for them to defend as their fellow conservatives around the country — as in Nebraska — continue to raise fiscal and other concerns which demonstrate the ineffectiveness of even having the death penalty.

Nancy Hart is president of the Nevada Coalition Against the Death Penalty. Tod Story is executive director of the ACLU of Nevada.