It's a pretty well-known fact that execution typically costs around 10 times more than life imprisonment. Here's a page with links to multiple peer-reviewed sou

It's a pretty well-known fact that execution typically costs around 10 times more than life imprisonment. Here's a page with links to multiple peer-reviewed sources, covering multiple states: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/costs-death-penalty. The issue is that the appeals process is extremely expensive and time-consuming. You could conceivably simplify and streamline it (to the extent permitted by the Supreme Court, which has been mandating ever-stricter requirements for capital punishment cases), but that would make it even more unacceptably error-prone than it already is.