The economic costs of capital punishment

One interesting trend I am noticing in the modern public and political conversation about the death penalty is an attentiveness to the extraordinary economic costs of administering a system of capital punishment. 

For example, recent newspaper articles coming from California and Oklahoma have detailed the considerable state expenditures on the capital trials of Scott Peterson and Terry Nichols.  Moreover, as Kansas and New York are contemplating fixing their death penalty procedures after their current capital systems were declared unconstitutional, we are seeing editorials (noted here; see also here) and other commentary (noted here) expressing serious concerns about the high costs of administering the death penalty.

As I have said before, I think the purely economic costs of the death penalty is an issue that has been under-examined even in the voluminous academic literature about capital punishment.  (The Death Penalty Information Center, however, has collected terrific capital cost data here.)  Perhaps some smart folks with economics training and interest might start giving these sorts of matters serious attention.