Allison Burroughs, partner in the firm's Litigation Department and a member of the Government Investigations and White Collar Crime practice group, published "Is death penalty ever worth the cost?" in The Boston Globe's Opinion section on February 18. The op-ed piece discusses the recent decision by the US Attorney's Office for the District of Massachusetts to file its Notice of Intent to Seek the Death Penalty for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev for the Boston Marathon bombings and, ethics of the issue aside, whether seeking the death penalty is ever worth the time and resources it takes to sentence someone to death when the likelihood that the penalty will be carried out is highly remote.
Allison notes that a death penalty case is resource intensive and that a decision to forgo the death penalty in this case would have saved years of judicial and prosecutorial resources, ensured that prosecutors were available to prosecute other cases and thereby help other victims, and likely resulted in a quick resolution to the case. She opines that regardless of what we ultimately decide as a society about the morality of the death penalty, as a matter of resource allocation, pursuing the death penalty might not make sense no matter how heinous the crime.
Please click here to view the full text of this article, originally published in The Boston Globe, click here.
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