That is, unless you work for a parody tabloid like The Clarion-Ledger, which thinks the question should be this: why let a silly thing like a budget get in the way?

In fact, the Hinds D.A.'s decision to pick and choose its death-penalty battles based on budgetary constraints actually increases the already unacceptable risk that capital punishment will be applied arbitrarily. By admitting (as Hinds district attorney Robert Smith does with honesty) that an economic factor now enters into the decisions of prosecutors, one can only assume that the D.A.'s office will seek death penalties in cases where it is prepared to overwhelm financially indigent defendants. In other words, the poorest defendants in the system -- the ones most in need of a fair trial buttressed by all the protections afforded them under the Constitution -- will be more likely to face the gallows, not because of their cases' merits, but by virtue of the thinness of their pocketbooks.

Even when money is no object to the American system of justice, the death penalty is woefully unworkable under the U.S. Constitution. The problem is only highlighted by recent budget concerns. The solution, editorial musings notwithstanding, is not to plow ahead blindly, real-world consequences be damned, but for Mississippi to pause, take an honest look at capital punishment, and to decide whether this system, in the real world, is a weight with which we're willing to slip under the economic waves.