Washington pauses to reflect on death penalty

Washington State Death Chamber

Though capital punishment has always been a part of the United States’ history, its use was suspended from 1972 to 1976, when the Supreme Court found the death penalty was bordering on unconstitutional and qualified as cruel and unusual punishment.

By 1977 capital punishment was slowly being reintroduced by the majority of U.S. states — including Washington, which revised its statute in 1981 so only aggravated, first-degree murder convictions could qualify for the death penalty. Washington has executed five people since. 

Mark Larranaga, a Seattle private practice attorney and former director of Washington’s Death Penalty Assistance Center, said that’s reason enough to re-examine the state’s policy.

“The reality is, in 40 years we have executed five people, three voluntary — they waived their appeals,” he said. “Forty years is a pretty good chunk of history to do an assessment.”

Larranaga also served on the state’s Death Penalty Subcommittee of the Committee on Public Defense. In its 2006 report, it found that since 1981, there had been 254 death-eligible cases in Washington but just four resulted in executions. (One more person has been executed since the release of that report.)

“History has told us, in four decades of trying to administer Washington’s death penalty, it’s undeniable that we are spending millions and millions and millions of dollars on a product that fails miserably,” he said. “The system — and what it’s trying to do — has failed.”

Even more, some prosecutors in Washington fear that a capital trial — which the committee found to carry an average cost of $470,000 — could bankrupt a county. And though the state has a fund for “extraordinary criminal justice costs,” counties that ask for reimbursement from it rarely see more than a small fraction of their request.

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Source: Aljazeera, March 24, 2014