California’s new governor channelled his inner Jay Inslee last week when he
shut down the largest death row in America. Gavin Newsom called the death
penalty “inconsistent with our bedrock values” and said it “strikes at the very
heart of what it means to be a Californian.”
We’ll give Newsom credit for strong convictions, if not originality, and accept
that the world seldom notices a West Coast social movement until it takes hold
in California.
Leaders in our state have long known capital punishment is an inherently
wasteful, erratic and morally fraught practice — and that it runs counter to
what it means to be a Washingtonian.
Inslee set the tone in 2014, during his 1st term as governor, when he said no
executions would proceed on his watch. The Washington Supreme Court was next to
lay down a marker, unanimously ruling last fall that the death penalty is
unconstitutional because it’s “arbitrary” and “racially biased.”
All that remains is for lawmakers in Olympia to pass a bill that wipes the
death penalty from state statute and leaves nothing to chance.
The Senate has approved legislation that would make life imprisonment without
possibility of parole the only option for prosecutors pursuing aggravated
1st-degree murder charges. The House should now pick up Senate Bill 5339 and
carry it to the finish line, before the 2019 session runs out.
Some argue legislative action is unnecessary because the death penalty is, for
all practical purposes, dead in Washington. No executions have taken place here
since 2010, and the decrees by Inslee and the Supreme Court ensure none will
happen in the foreseeable future.
But the court left wiggle room for a future Legislature to try to enact a
new-and-improved way to execute the worst of our state’s worst offenders — one
that doesn’t place black defendants at more than quadruple the risk of being
sentenced to death as their white counterparts.
If 50 years of failed fixes have taught us anything, it’s that the death
penalty is beyond repair and lawmakers should abolish it once and for all.
In Walla Walla — home of the Washington State Penitentiary, where 8 men awaited
death by lethal injection before last year’s court ruling, including three for
murders in Pierce County — an in-depth report by the Union-Bulletin newspaper
in 2009 pegged the cost of carrying out the death penalty over three decades at
$20 million.
In that time, 5 men were executed, while countless family members were dragged
through excruciatingly long appeals.
Life without parole is a more cost-efficient punishment, and is no less
effective as a criminal deterrent — especially when you factor in the threat of
solitary confinement for bad behavior that hangs over inmates’ heads.
Meanwhile, Washington residents grapple with uneven application of the law.
Green River killer Gary Ridgway, convicted of slaying 49 young women, wasn’t
sent to death row. Nor was Terapon Adhahn, who abducted and killed 12-year-old
Zina Linnick in 2007, despite saying he’d prefer to die for his crimes against
the Tacoma girl.
To those who fear ending the death penalty signifies Washington leaders are
going soft on hardcore criminals, we beg to differ. A bill this year that
would’ve given some inmates serving life sentences a shot at freedom never made
it out committee. Washingtonians aren’t ready for that conversation.
But they’re more than ready to wash their hands of the state-sanctioned
business of taking people’s lives.
The governor did it. So did the Supreme Court. Legislators should follow their
lead, show our state speaks with one voice on this matter and make clear who
the West Coast’s true progressive leader is when it comes to shedding an
archaic apparatus of injustice.
Source: Tacoma News Tribune, March 21, 2019
⚑ | 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
