Why does a prison execution cost the govt 2 million dollars shouldn it just be one bullet?
Because you get appeal after appeal after appeal and it ends up with convicted murderers living on death row for years and years. A quarter of deaths of death row prisoners in the US are in fact due to natural causes – they die before they can be executed. The average time on death row is over 10 years and some would consider the constant uncertainty over whether a prisoner will be executed soon or not to be cruel and unusual punishment in itself. The legal costs makes it actually cheaper to abolish the death penalty and make the sentence one of life imprisonment instead – and for the quarter of prisoners that die on death row that’s what they effectively get anyway. When the UK still used capital punishment, the rule was that the execution took place within 30 days of the conviction or not at all.
