Let me sketch out for you what Governor Schwarzenegger’s new budget plan for California is going to be. We have a $141 billion dollar budget plan that aims towards cutting education funding and state subsidies for the elderly by ten percent, and Medi Cal could face a billion dollar cut as well. If that isn’t bad enough 22,000 inmates are going to be released early.

This is the plan that is going to be done so that California can escape the $14 billion dollar deficit that is breathing down our necks. Since Schwarzenegger is truthful when he says that we are facing a multi-billion dollar deficit then why is he going to spend $136 million on a new death row at San Quentin State Prison. San Quentin is not only the oldest prison we have but it also is the most expensive out of all of them to operate.

By the time this idea is finished it is going to wind up costing California over a billion dollars. In the very beginning the Legislature granted $220 million for the project. Just on the planning for this complex has cost $20 million; the building is going to be around $356 million to construct. The price of this project is costing us way more money then anyone expected.

If we are going to spend money while we are supposed to be saving it, why is a new death row on the top of the list? It isn’t like the inmates on death row are going to go anywhere anytime soon. On average it takes over ten to fifteen years to execute someone who is on death row. Our tax dollars are not only spent to house them for all those years but it also will cost $17,000 dollars for each inmate to be executed.

If the drugs to execute them only cost $122, then what the heck are we spending the other $16,878 dollars on! It’s all of the extra fees for an execution team, maintenance, and phone installations for the media.

California has the most congested death row, holding 641condemned inmates. As an alternative to spending a billion dollars for a new death row complex for inmates who are going to be dead in ten to twenty years anyways, we should just get rid of them now. No death row inmates, means no need for a new billion dollar complex.

Spending $17,000 to execute each one of them is obviously ridiculous; in the end it would wind up costing us $10, 897,000 dollars for every inmate. A more simplistic and cheaper way to execute them would be to just give them an $8.99 bottle of NyQuil to drink, and shoot them when they pass out. That would only cost about $5,762 to execute all of them together.

A more realistic approach to this situation would be to shorten the appeals process. The American legal system allows criminals to overturn their convictions by continually appealing a courts decision. This process is costly and timely. The way California’s legal system is set up, criminals on death row can spend their entire lives appealing their verdict, while we pay for their lawyer fees.

Although it is very rare, some inmates on death row are innocent, and they have a chance to prove their innocence through the appeals process. I propose that there be a limited number of appeals to which an inmate is entitled. That way, an inmate on death row would still have the chance to prove their innocence, but would also save the tax payers millions of dollars. If the liberals would stop prancing around the issues involving the 1% of death row inmates that were proven innocent, we might not be in as much of debt as we are today.

All in all this isn’t a project that should be on the top of our To-Do list, and if the California government insists on splurging on non important projects, we won’t be getting ourselves out of debt anytime soon.