"California had little money for innovations like community policing, but was managing to spend an extra $90 million per year on capital punishment. Texas, with over 300 people on death row, is spending an estimated $2.3 million per case, but its murder rate remains one of the highest in the country. "


California, for example, was spending $10 million a year reimbursing counties for expert witnesses, investigators and other death-penalty defense costs, plus $2 million more to help pay for the overall cost of murder trials in smaller counties. (Now, even that reimbursement is being cut.) But many financially strapped smaller counties still could not afford to prosecute the complicated death-penalty cases. Some small counties have only one prosecutor with little or no experience in death-penalty cases, no investigators, and only a single Superior Court judge.(22)