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The only extra care given to capital cases in the United States is the bifurcated nature of the trial with both guilt and penalty phases and the requirement for death-qualified juries. While these impart some additional amount of time and expense, the biggest contributing factor is the lengthy appeals process. This is what's usually in the crosshairs of people who want to speed up the execution process, because it's the most obvious contributing factor; the trials may take a bit longer, but people don't start the clock on these things until after the sentence is pronounced. The problem, though, isn't that the appeals process is any different for capital cases than it is for other cases, but that the entire process is almost always utilized.
Most criminal convictions in the US are the result of plea bargains, and there isn't much to appeal in those cases. You could theoretically claim that an incompetent attorney talked you into taking a bad deal, but winning that appeal would at best get you a trial, at which you could be convicted and sentenced to a stiffer penalty. So no point in appealing that unless the situation is desperate or your attorney really likes your chances of winning. Also if there's a DNA exoneration or something like that, but those are rare. Even without a plea, though, most defendants don't appeal because it simply isn't worth it. Defendants who do appeal will usually only do so when there are clear avenues for appeal, and they will limit their appeal to those avenues. They'll also usually stop after losing at the first stage, and will only press further if there's a serious constitutional issue at stake.
Death penalty cases never result from plea bargains, and the defendants have no incentive to not file every appeal they can. So rather than focus on a few key issues they'll throw the entire record into question. Challenge everything in there that can be challenged. And capital cases are complicated and bifurcated so they have incredibly long records. This means the prosecutor has to wade through thousands of pages of trial transcripts to properly contest the appeal, and he's on the public payroll. So take your appeal to the intermediate appellate court and wait a couple years. When that appeal is rejected, take it to the state supreme court to be rejected (some states have tried to short-circuit this process by giving all capital appeals directly to the supreme court). Then maybe appeal that ruling to the US Supreme Court. They probably won't take it, but you'll by some time waiting for them to deny cert.
By this point, your appeals are exhausted, but that's not the end of it. Now you start filing for post-conviction relief. This is where you argue that defects outside the record merit reconsideration. Things like ineffective assistance of counsel, discovery of new evidence, and an intervening court decision. These also take a while. But then after that you get to argue the same things in a Federal habeas corpus petition. All of this by itself take a long time, but in a significant number of cases the defendant actually wins an appeal or a motion for relief. The thing is that winning these doesn't get you out of jail, but simply gets you a new trial, or a new sentencing phase. So now the defendant goes back to square one (or two) and starts the whole process over again.
The incentives in this process line up so that the goal is to expend as much time as possible. Someone serving a ten year sentence isn't going to do it this way because he's probably going to be out of prison before the appeals are exhausted. Someone serving a life sentence isn't going to do this because if they can theoretically get out they want out as fast as possible; buying time does nothing. But death row inmates aren't that stupid (or at least their attorneys aren't). Any postponement is a bonus, even if the end result is the same.
I honestly don't see any way around this. I understand the sentiment around not wanting to waste time, but these are protections that are enjoyed by everybody, and we have to look beyond death row if we want to scuttle them. Yeah, most death row inmates are total pieces of shit, but in some cases there really were serious procedural mistakes, in some cases there really was ineffective counsel, and there occasionally are exonerations. I'm not comfortable with the idea of intentionally scuttling constitutional protections across the board for the sole purpose of making it easier to execute people. I'm not sure what exactly is gained from that.
I think the answer is 'fast track appeals, so capital cases who appeal their sentence get a hearing almost immediately, and if they lose, it's over quickly'.
That sounds good in theory, but the reality is that court backlogs aren't the reason these cases take so long to resolve, and trying to force the issue actually increases the chance that the prosecution loses. Technically speaking, appeals are on a strict timeline. In reality, like most things in law, nothing is that strict. I can't speak for all states, but here's how it works in Pennsylvania:
After sentencing, the defense has 10 days to file a post-trial motion. This is where you list all the errors you think the court made and politely ask the court to reconsider them. Since you only have ten days to file, though, you pro-forma list every adverse decision the judge made. At this point, the judge has 120 days to grant or deny the relief. Since these motions are rarely granted, the default is that if no decision has been rendered in 120 days, they are automatically denied. Since this doesn't require the judge to actually do anything, you can expect to wait the full 120 days. Then you have 30 days to file notice of appeal. Once the notice is filed, the court will send a docketing statement, that has a deadline by which you must file a Statement of Errors with the trial court. Except you just got the transcript after 4 months, and this transcript is 11,000 pages long, and you need time to go through it to catch all the errors. So 2 weeks before the Statement is due, you file a motion with the court for an extension, which they grant, because the prosecution doesn't oppose it, because if they did then defense counsel would never agree to their extension requests. So the deadline gets extended by a month.
Once the Statement is finally submitted, the trial judge has to actually respond to every argument. And he's going to take his sweet time responding because he's about to start another trial which he isn't about to postpone for the third time just so he can respond to your long-shot motion, so add another couple months onto that. Once he's explained why your arguments are bullshit, you have to file a brief in support of your motion, which you nominally have 30 days to do but which you're going to ask for an extension on because you've raised so many issues that you need time to properly research the issues and apply the law to the facts in this monster transcript. And the prosecution again raises no opposition, because they don't exactly have an attorney assigned to handling this appeal and the trial team are all busy trying to incarcerate criminals who aren't in jail indefinitely and don't have the time to spend going through that 11,000 page transcript themselves and countering all of your arguments. After all, if they contest your motion then you're not exactly going to be inclined to grant them any extensions, which means their brief would be dogshit and you'd waive oral argument while the appeals court remands the case for a new trial and they're back to square one. So you get your extension. And since you got your extension, you're in no position to request their request for an extension, and they get one as well. And once you get their brief you now have 14 days to file a reply brief, which you probably don't do unless they made a particularly bad argument, but anyway. Now, a year and a half after sentencing, we're finally at the point where the case can even get scheduled for argument.
The upshot is that it's not so much the court's time that's the problem but the attorneys' time. We can certainly increase the speed of these appeals by hiring dedicated appellate teams for local DA's offices, but these offices don't have the budgets to fully staff their offices as it is. Why would we prioritize these cases? These defendants have already been convicted and are going to be in jail forever and a day regardless of what happens. Every capital case that gets fast tracked means another case gets bumped. Is this really more important than a free speech case? Or a case where there are legitimate questions about illegal searches? Or even a commercial case where the law is genuinely ambiguous? Shouldn't we dedicate what limited resources we have toward prosecuting crimes where the defendants haven't been convicted and might not be? Or do we raise local taxes to give DA's offices more money? That won't sit well in red areas. In Washington County, a rural/exurban county outside of Pittsburgh, the new DA has decided to make a statement by charging every murder he can as a capital case. His first year in office there were 9 murders in a county of about 200,000 people. He charged 5 capital cases, including 1 woman whose only connection to the crime was that her fingerprint had been found on a shell casing. This isn't a particularly large office. He probably could've gotten plea deals on most of these, but instead he has to waste taxpayer money on a quixotic attempt at securing the death penalty in a state that has a moratorium on executions, and that is considering abolishing capital punishment on the grounds that it's an inefficient generator of the bullshit described above.
I greatly doubt that this would actually result in expedited processes. The legal profession is hardly alone in finding that the amount of putative work that exists tends to increase to meet the number of individuals that are doing that work, but it's a stark example of the phenomenon. The United States has no shortage of attorneys, but legal proceedings have tended to increase in length rather than becoming quick and straightforward processes. Much like many of the other issues caused by endless legal wrangling and treating obvious bullshit as worth 120 day waiting periods, these aren't problems with no known solution to man, but problems created by the legal profession and the love its practitioners hold for artificial complication.
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