With the state in the worst budget crisis in its history--jobs and services being eliminated or trimmed and the governor desperately hunting for new sources of revenue--the death penalty has become a luxury we can no longer afford.

Yes, a luxury.

Study after study has shown us two things:

1. Executing convicted killers costs much more than keeping them in prison for the rest of their lives.

2. Executing convicted killers does not deter other people from killing.

Both truths violate popular assumptions about capital punishment and together they reveal the capital punishment system as yet another bloated and inefficient government program.

Think of it as a pork-barrel project for the psyche--an expenditure of our scarce dollars that accomplishes nothing other than to make people feel good. Dispatching murderers with lethal injections of chemicals has a satisfying moral symmetry in the view of a majority of the population as well as the survivors of many of the victims who believe it offers closure and justice.

It's not free. Capital cases cost more at every level, from the trial through the numerous appeals to make sure we're not executing the wrong person or anything, through the imprisonment and even through the execution itself. And in flush times, proponents can plausibly lump it into the category of one of those crowd-pleasing, government-sponsored frills, like parades, festivals and new sports stadiums.

But now is no time for frills. And in a happy coincidence, our state representatives, particularly those who fancy themselves responsible conservatives, will have the opportunity to exhibit their fiscal discipline by voting yes on legislation to abolish the death penalty.

To the surprise of many, that bill handily passed the House Judiciary Committee Thursday with bipartisan support and has moved to the full House.

The cost issue was mentioned only in passing during the committee hearing in Springfield and is obviously not the main concern of the sponsors.

They are worried about the fundamental arbitrariness in the system, the effects of wealth, race and geography on who gets a life sentence and who gets death, the raft of human factors--errors of omission and commission--that every so often result in innocent people being sentenced to die.

Many proposals now in the pipeline will at least mitigate some of these problems and salve the conscience of lawmakers who want to continue supporting capital punishment (This, for death penalty abolitionists, is the downside of reform).

But none of these proposals addresses the pocketbook issue, and some of them stand to make capital justice even more expensive.

We don't know just how much extra we pay for this do-nothing government program in Illinois. The Governor's Commission on Capital Punishment considered sponsoring a study that would try to isolate all the additional costs the death penalty imposes on the police, the prosecution, the public defenders, the courts and the prison system, but in the end decided to rely on research performed elsewhere:

A 2002 report from the Indiana Criminal Law Study Commission found that the costs of maintaining that state's death penalty system exceed the projected costs of maintaining a life-without-parole system by 38 percent.

A 2000 analysis by the Palm Beach Post that estimated Florida spends $51 million a year simply to maintain the death penalty.

A 1993 Duke University study found that going through the entire process required to execute a prisoner costs $2.16 million more than keeping him locked up until he dies of natural causes.

A 1992 calculation by the Dallas Morning News showed that Texas spent an average of $2.3 million per execution, roughly the cost of keeping a prisoner in single-cell maximum security for 120 years.

A 1999 estimate presented to the Joint Legislative Budget Committee of the California Legislature and passed along by the Death Penalty Information Center said eliminating the death penalty would save the state government "at least several tens of millions of dollars annually" and save combined local jurisdictions "in the millions to tens of millions of dollars."

Yes, the probable savings here would only run into the millions of dollars--not a big chunk of an Illinois state budget deficit in the billions, but still. In tough times, this is an easy choice.