What the death penalty costs Pennsylvania taxpayers

PennLive's probe can't put a dollar figure on it, but it does reveal this:

Since it was reinstated in 1978, only three people on death row in Pennsylvania have actually died by lethal injection, and those three defendants basically signed their own death warrants by waiving their rights to appeal.
    
A much higher number, about 140 people, have been released from death row following successful appeals.
    
Some were found to be innocent. Most simply had their sentences commuted to life in prison. But in the meantime, taxpayers were footing the bill for their lengthy appeals, and by lengthy, we’re talking decades....

Instead of paying for a better defense up front, Pennsylvanians are paying the price of years of appeals, hearings and re-investigations that often don’t even lead to death by lethal injection....

In federal cases, attorneys are paid $160 an hour.
    
In 1990, a state task force reviewing the death penalty decided a good hourly rate was $75.

You try to do the math.

Geo Godley sure can swing

While the cabletards were working up a lather over the impending execution of an innocent black man last night, much of the nation was enraptured by a more significant event, the premiere of Simon Cowell's hot new music reality show, "The X Factor."

The treat of the night came when a 43-year-old blogger by the name of Geo Godley took pants on the ground to a whole different level by deliberately dropping his baggy slacks  and flopping and waggling his willie ("X"-d out on TV) to the astonishment of the 4,000 fans and judges. Paula Abdul stormed away and feigned that she was going to vomit; another woman hustled a child to the exits. But was this guy really a prick who did an Extreme Elvis by actually unfurling his johnson or was he swirling a disgusting penis sock puppet? The producers had to know what was about to come and that the auditorium was a-swim with children. And Paula has seen worse; she was once married to Emilio Estevez.

You can download Geo's hot track, "I'm a Stud," on iTunes.

And an hour and eight minutes after "X Factor" signed off, Troy Davis was dead.