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“There is a part of the warden that dies with the prisoner,” wrote Donald Cabana, who oversaw multiple executions as warden at the Mississippi State Penitentiary before becoming an opponent of capital punishment. As Gov. Mike Braun calls for dialogue on Indiana’s death penalty, we must confront the unconscionable moral burden it places on Hoosiers while creating hypocrisy and waste that undermines our legal system’s credibility.
State Rep. Bob Morris, sponsor of abolition legislation last session, identified a central contradiction: Correctional officers “care for these prisoners, feed them, house them, and then in the end, they kill them.” This caregiver-executioner paradox creates psychological trauma compounded by the death penalty’s arbitrariness. Officers routinely guard general-population inmates whose crimes are as heinous as those on death row, yet these inmates will live while others die—not based on crime severity but on county resources and prosecutor politics.
Executioners have suffered severe alcoholism, called themselves “serial killers” and have even committed suicide. Yet the state must also recruit those who are eager or indifferent to killing—raising profound questions about what kind of person volunteers to end human life and whether enabling them serves public safety. The recruitment process creates an untenable choice: Traumatize people who care about human life or enable those with concerning psychological profiles.
Also troubling is the hypocrisy of Indiana law, which makes murder-for-hire eligible for the death penalty, specifically criminalizing both hiring and being hired to kill. Yet Indiana engages in this conduct, spending upward of $1.18 million—with $600,000 wasted on expired drugs—to kill convicts Joseph Corcoran and Ben Ritchie. Every taxpayer becomes complicit in what Indiana’s own statutes define as capital murder.
This resource-intensive system creates a double lottery of injustice: first, arbitrary selection of who gets death sentences based on county wealth and prosecutor ambition rather than crime severity; then, an 80% chance that the death sentence will not be carried out. Even those randomly selected for maximum resources are rarely executed. Meanwhile, hundreds of victims lack justice because finite resources are wasted. While death penalty cases consume nearly 10 times more resources than life sentences, Indiana ranks third-worst nationally in solving murders and has an astonishing backlog of untested rape kits, leaving predators free to reoffend.
Proponents now advocate for “cheaper” methods like firing squads, but this misses the point entirely. Firing squads create the same psychological toll on staff and pose additional risks if shots miss their targets. The relevant expense isn’t the killing method but the entire system costing four times more than life sentences.
The state should not ask employees to be both caregivers and killers, should not force taxpayers to fund what it defines as the most heinous form of murder, and should not operate execution schemes that mirror the crimes they punish. Every dollar wasted on this broken system is a dollar not spent solving the hundreds of murders and sexual assaults that leave victims without justice.
Indiana should abolish the death penalty entirely, achieving public safety goals without corrupting our institutions, traumatizing our employees or compromising our values.•
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Houdek is a staff attorney at the Indiana Public Defender Council. Send comments to [email protected].
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