The ruling makes Washington the latest state to do away with capital punishment. The court was unanimous in its order that the eight people presently on death row have their sentences converted to life in prison.
OLYMPIA, Wash. (AP) — Washington’s Supreme Court struck down the state’s death penalty Thursday, ruling that it had been used in an arbitrary and racially discriminatory manner.
Washington has had a moratorium on executions since 2014, but the ruling makes it the 20th state to do away with capital punishment.
The court unanimously converted the sentences of the eight people on death row to life in prison, though the justices differed mildly in their reasoning.
“The use of the death penalty is unequally applied — sometimes by where the crime took place, or the county of residence, or the available budgetary resources at any given point in time, or the race of the defendant,” Chief Justice Mary Fairhurst wrote in the lead opinion.
She added: “Our capital punishment law lacks ‘fundamental fairness.'”
Gov. Jay Inslee, a one-time supporter of capital punishment, imposed the moratorium, saying that no executions would take place while he’s in office.
In a written statement, Inslee called the ruling “a hugely important moment in our pursuit for equal and fair application of justice.”
“The court makes it perfectly clear that capital punishment in our state has been imposed in an ‘arbitrary and racially biased manner,’ is ‘unequally applied’ and serves no criminal justice goal,” Inslee wrote.
The ruling was in the case of Allen Eugene Gregory, a black man who was convicted of raping, robbing and killing Geneine Harshfield, a 43-year-old woman, in 1996.
His lawyers said the death penalty is arbitrarily applied and that it is not applied proportionally, as the state Constitution requires.
The court did not rule out the possibility that the Legislature could come up with another manner of imposing death sentences, but said the state’s longstanding practice was invalid.
“We leave open the possibility that the legislature may enact a ‘carefully drafted statute’ to impose capital punishment in this state, but it cannot create a system that offends constitutional rights,” the opinion said.
Attorney General Bob Ferguson said he would press the Legislature to make the sole punishment for aggravated murder life in prison without release.
The court did not reconsider any of Gregory’s arguments pertaining to guilt, noting that his conviction for aggravated first-degree murder “has already been appealed and affirmed by this court.”
Earlier this year, the state Senate passed a measure abolishing the death penalty, but it died in the House. It was the furthest any death penalty measure had gotten in the state Legislature after several years of effort.
“There is a profound shift in our state and country that the death penalty is below us as a civil, just and moral society,” Democratic Sen. Reuven Carlyle, who had been a sponsor of those previous attempts, said in a text message.
Source: seattletimes.com, Rachel La Corte, October 11, 2018
Washington Supreme Court Abolishes the Death Penalty
On Oct. 11, 2018, the state of Washington's supreme court unanimously struck down the death penalty as unconstitutional, ruling the "death penalty is invalid because it is imposed in an arbitrary and racially biased matter" and because it fails to serve any legitimate penological goal." The death penalty is a punishment that is as flawed as it is final, and as the Washington high court acknowledges, one plagued by racial bias and arbitrariness.
The ruling came in response to an appeal in Allen Gregory's case. Gregory argued that the entire death penalty scheme in Washington was unconstitutionally discriminatory, relying in large part on a rigorous and sophisticated statistical study by researchers at the University of Washington. The study ultimately showed that Washington juries were more than four times as likely to sentence a Black defendant to death as a non-Black defendant.
Gregory's case led a broad group of advocates, researchers, and criminal justice attorneys to file amicus briefs arguing Washington's death penalty scheme was a demonstrated failure, infected by racial bias and arbitrariness. 75 retired or former judges in Washington state joined the ACLU’s amicus brief asking the Washington court to strike the death penalty. They did so because they had the grim benefit of front row seats to its unjust application.
Today's decision is a blow to racial injustice, yet nationwide the racism inherent in the procession and decisions in capital cases too often is unaddressed. In fact, the Washington Supreme Court joins just a small number of state courts, including Massachusetts and Connecticut, that have struck down the death penalty after recognizing the intolerable taint of racial discrimination.
Racial bias is the intractable legacy of the death penalty's history in America. Capital punishment can never free itself of the yoke of its roots in lynchings and racial terror. As the Equal Justice Initiative's national lynching memorial viscerally demonstrates, many of the same southern and midwestern counties that tolerated and even encouraged lynchings of Black men were enthusiastic proponents of capital punishment.
But the legacy of racial violence extends beyond just any county or state border: Racial bias permeates capital punishment at every stage from the decision to charge the death penalty to execution. One acute pinch point of that discrimination is in jury selection.
Prosecutors across the country routinely discriminate against potential Black jurors in capital cases by striking them from serving. In 2016, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled for Timothy Foster after handwritten notes from the prosecution surfaced showing its relentless efforts to strike Black jurors from his capital case. This included the prosecutor's notes designating each Black juror with a "B" and noting the lone juror they would accept if they "have to pick a Black juror."
This kind of discrimination in juror selection is far from limited to Foster's case. In studies ranging from North Carolina up to Pennsylvania and back down to Louisiana, we see clear systematic discrimination against qualified Black jurors in capital cases. In North Carolina, prosecutors were trained statewide, with a handy top-10-style cheat sheet, in how to give pre-textual explanations to avoid being caught for racial discrimination.
Decisions about who should live and who should die are too often driven by the race of the defendant or race of the victim, as studies for decades have repeatedly shown. But, as the Washington Supreme Court found, the death penalty's problems go far beyond racial bias. It is a flawed and ineffective tool of justice, one has become itself a tool of injustice. Capital punishment does not deter crime, and it fails to protect the innocent from wrongful convictions.
These concerns have caused the public to turn from the death penalty, with support for capital punishment at a near-historic low in the modern area. Likewise, death penalty jury verdicts and executions have plummeted. Today, Washington became the 20th state to officially reject capital punishment. 3 other states have governor moratoriums, and another 10 states have not had an execution in the last decade.
The problems with the death penalty cannot be fixed. It is time for other courts to follow Washington's lead and strike the unconstitutional, unjust, and racially discriminatory punishment from the books once and for all.
Source: ACLU, C. Stubbs, October 11, 2018. Cassandra Stubbs is Director of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project.
Washington Becomes the 20th State to Abolish the Death Penalty
Reacting to news that the Washington State Supreme Court has ruled the death penalty violates its Constitution, Kristina Roth, Senior Program Officer at Amnesty International USA stated:
"This is tremendous news for all who fought to abolish the death penalty in Washington. Now that Washington has become the 20th state to end the ultimate cruel, inhuman, and degrading punishment, other states should follow suit.
"The Court ruled that the death penalty is imposed in an arbitrary and racially biased manner and is invalid. The death penalty is the ultimate denial of human rights, it does not deter crime or improve public safety, and it should be ended once and for all."
106 countries had abolished the death penalty in law for all crimes by the end of 2017 and 142 countries had abolished the death penalty in law or practice. These figures underscore the global trend towards abolition of the death penalty. Only a few countries carry out executions. Just 4 countries were responsible for 84% of all recorded executions in 2017.
In 2017, the US had 23 executions in 8 states: Alabama (3) Arkansas (4) Florida (3) Georgia (1) Missouri (1) Ohio (2) Texas (7) Virginia (2). Texas remained the state with the highest number of executions, accounting for 30% of the national total.
Source: Amnesty International USA, October 11, 2018
⚑ | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us:
deathpenaltynews@gmail.com.
Opposed to Capital Punishment? Help us keep this blog up and running! DONATE!
"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
