EXPOSÉ’s “Death Is Different” has its broadcast premiere tonight. Check local listings.

“Death Is Different” producer Oriana Zill de Granados is no stranger to criminal justice issues. Her recent work includes two Frontline documentaries -- a 3-year investigation about the war on drugs, where she focused on both federal and local prosecutions and whether they had been effective, and last year’s “The Enemy Within” about whether federal prosecutors were prosecuting the war on terror “in a just and adequate fashion.” Yet even Zill de Granados admitted a certain surprise at the how unequal the process of determining a death sentence is across the nation.

Zill de Granados, who also serves as the productions director at the Center for Investigative Reporting, talked to the Blog about the national importance of Stephen Henderson’s reporting and why it was selected for EXPOSÉ:

[The] piece highlights how difficult it is for death penalty defense in some states around the country, and how death penalty defense is really not being funded equally in various states -- which means that if you’re on death row in Texas, you’re probably going to get a state-funded lawyer who’s going to run your case, where if you’re on death row in Mississippi, you’re going to get a county lawyer/public defender who doesn’t really have the resources that are necessary to do an adequate defense according to the standards that have been laid out by the Supreme Court.

In three of the four states McClatchy reporter Stephen Henderson examined “poor legal representation is a result of official policy,” a> he concluded. “The states pay no more than a pittance to help lawyers defend their clients, and none requires that well-trained attorneys handle death cases.” Low pay for attorneys, little money for needed investigations into their clients’ backgrounds, and few funds for additional medical/psychiatric evaluations hampered many defense cases. (Capital defense is expensive, so expensive in fact that a recent article in The Economist suggests that an argument that was once used for the death penalty – that taxpayers should not be required to pay for the life incarceration of a murderer – is now one of the arguments against it: “It is now far more expensive to execute someone than to jail him for life; in North Carolina, for instance, each capital case costs $2m more. Ordinary inmates need only to be fed and guarded. Those on death row must have lawyers arguing expensively about their fate, sometimes for a decade or more.”)

One bright spot that Henderson found in his reporting was Georgia. Although previously as bad as the others -- Georgia’s former county-based capital defense system was found woefully inadequate -- a publicly funded, statewide capital defenders office started in 2005 had apparently been having results and, as of January 2007, none of its 46 clients had been sentenced to death. Zill de Granados traveled with some of the lawyers from the Georgia Capital Defenders office and filmed them for “Death is Different.” She was impressed with their 24-hour-a-day work ethic. “I had never really seen such devotion and passion in young people in recent years,” Zill de Granados told the Blog. “They really impressed me, I was blown away.”

In the end, however, capital defense may just prove too costly. Just last Friday, the head of the Georgia Capital Defenders announced his resignation, citing funding shortfalls that were compromising his office’s ability to defend its death row clients.

>>See Stephen Henderson and the Georgia Capital Defenders in EXPOSÉ’s “Death Is Different” online and on your local PBS station.

>> Read more of EXPOSÉ’s interview with Oriana Zill de Granados, including her take on the challenges and rewards of filming EXPOSÉ-style.