Illinois death chamber under construction at Tamm prison (1998)

A few freewheeling criminal defense lawyers and experts-for-hire appear to be living large on the public dime in Illinois. That’s nothing new, but the fact that they’re capitalizing on capital punishment is disturbing.

Kevin McDermott and Nicholas J.C. Pistor of the Post-Dispatch reported Sunday that oversight of Illinois’ multimillion-dollar Capital Litigation Trust Fund has been lax at best and, more often, laughable. The fund was set up eight years ago after investigations showed several death row inmates were not guilty of the crimes for which they’d been convicted.

In establishing the fund, Illinois taxpayers endorsed the idea of trying to level the playing field for defendants facing the death penalty against government prosecutions with few spending limits.

But a cottage industry has sprung up around the fund. The reporters found that the fund approved top-dollar fees for defense teams; out-of-state expert witnesses who charged hundreds of dollars an hour for weeks or months at a time and huge payouts for vaguely worded, unverifiable investigative services.

Illinois State Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias responded almost immediately to the news report, proposing a broad range of reforms to rein in defense costs in capital costs. Among them: limits on travel and lodging expenses and a review board to examine all requested reimbursements.

That’s well and good. The fund shouldn’t be manipulated by private interests. But there’s a larger issue at stake.

Taxpayers, and not just in Illinois, should take a cold, hard look at the true and full costs of death penalty prosecutions. Yes, it’s a problem that court-appointed lawyers, defense experts and investigators run up fees without adequate oversight or documentation. But this represents just a fraction of the public costs of such cases.

Much greater sums of money are being spent on the investigation, prosecution, appeals, federal habeas corpus proceedings, incarceration and, yes, for the execution itself.

A few states have conducted financial and performance audits of systems for prosecuting, defending and carrying out sentences in death penalty cases, comparing them to the costs in non-capital murder prosecutions. Some of their findings:

• The Tennessee Comptroller of the Treasury concluded in 2004 that trial costs alone are 50 percent higher in death penalty cases than in cases in which life imprisonment is sought. These added expenses are wasted when cases are reversed on appeal because of trial error, which occurred in 29 percent of death penalty cases heard by Tennessee appellate courts from 1977 to 1995.

• An audit committee of the Kansas legislature concluded in 2003 that the total costs of pursuing death penalty cases exceeded by 70 percent the costs of bringing first-degree murder cases in which the death penalty was not pursued — and that included the costs of incarceration.

• A study committee convened by Indiana’s governor in 2002 similarly determined that convicting and executing a murder defendant costs 30 percent to 37.5 percent more than the cost of obtaining non-death penalty conviction in a first-degree murder case.

To be sure, prudence and careful management of funding the defense of death penalty cases is important. Standards and oversight should go a long way toward curing problems with Illinois’ Capital Litigation Trust Fund.

But it only would scratch the surface of a much larger issue: The death penalty — in addition to being morally wrong, as this page has long held, and dubious as a deterrent to crime — may not be worth its added expense.

Under former Gov. George Ryan, Illinois’ pioneering moratorium on executions has led to a national re-examination of its basic justice and wisdom. The state should expand its new inquiry into the Capital Litigation Trust Fund to include whether the death penalty makes financial sense and whether all parts of the system — not just defense lawyers — are making wise and good use of public money.