Dozens of speakers lined up to speak Tuesday on California's new proposed rules for executing condemned inmates, but the public hearing quickly morphed into a debate over the morality and practicality of capital punishment.

George Husaruk and his wife drove two-and-a-half hours from their home near Willits to argue that California can no longer afford the death penalty.

"We need to use the money for education," the middle-school teacher said during a daylong meeting convened by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to take public comment on its proposed lethal injection procedures.

The agency received more than 5,000 written comments in two months on the plan drafted in response to a federal court order in 2006. About 100 speakers signed up to speak at the hearing; most oppose the death penalty, and though the audience was warned to keep its comments focused on the proposal itself, the hearing soon expanded into a wider death penalty discussion.

Outside the hearing room, Father George Horan, a Catholic priest from Los Angeles, argued heatedly with death penalty advocate Howard Garber over whether life in prison without parole is a just sentence for heinous killers.

Many abolitionists have seized on the high cost of implementing the death penalty. A report released last year by a commission created by the state Senate and "using conservative rough projections" concluded that it will cost the state an additional $137 million a year to support the death penalty rather than making the maximum sentence life in prison without parole.