Louisiana is one of 29 states where the death penalty is legal, but Tuesday, Jan. 7 will mark exactly a decade since the state has executed anybody waiting on death row.
Michael Cahoon, an organizer at the Promise of Justice Initiative, and other advocates against the death penalty are hoping that execution will be the state’s last.
On the 10-year anniversary, they’ll be organizing an event — dubbed the Vigil for Life — that will take place outside of nonprofit Resurrection After Exoneration’s office at 1212 St. Bernard Ave. at 6 p.m.
The organization was founded by John Thompson who spent 14 years on death row and four in prison for a murder he did not commit before being released in 2013. He founded it to help wrongfully convicted individuals, like himself, transition back into society upon release from prison and death row. Thompson died in 2017.
“The 10-year gap in executions is indicative that the system is broken beyond repair,” Cahoon said, citing wrongful convictions, racial biases, increasing public opposition over the last decade and high costs.
Another part of the reason Louisiana, along with other states, hasn’t executed anyone on death row in recent years is that drug companies don’t want to sell lethal injection drugs to states. Since the early ‘90s, lethal injection is the only legal method of capital punishment in Louisiana.
People of good will can differ about whether capital punishment is the best way to impose justice on those who commit the most heinous crimes.
The last person to be executed in the state was Gerald Bordelon, who waived his right to further appeals. Prior to Bordelon, the last execution was in 2002.
State Public Defender James Dixon said in a committee meeting earlier this year that the Louisiana Public Defender Board (LPDB) that has spent more than $100 million on costs relating to the death penalty since 2008 — not including court spending, prosecutor spending and jury costs the state also pays.
Sister Helen Prejean, a New Orleans resident and prominent advocate for ending the death penalty, will speak at the vigil. After witnessing an execution and corresponding with people on death row, Prejean wrote a book called “Dead Man Walking,” which inspired a movie, play and opera and helped change public perception on the death penalty. Thompson’s wife, Laverne, is also slated to speak at the event.
Any statewide repeal of the death penalty would have to be passed by the Louisiana Legislature. Several attempts have been made over the past few years to end the practice in Louisiana, but ultimately to no avail.
Earlier this year, a bipartisan push to repeal the death penalty for any future crimes by state Rep. Terry Landry, D-New Iberia, and Sen. Dan Claitor, R-Baton Rouge, made its way out of committee and onto the House floor for the first time in years. But Landry pulled the bill before the House could vote on it, saying he did not have the votes needed to pass it.
Another bill that would have let Louisiana voters decide if they wanted to keep the death penalty failed a vote on the Senate floor 13-25. A renewed push in 2020 will have to be led by a new crop of legislators, as Claitor was term-limited out of the Senate and Landry retired from his House seat this year.
Aside from political pressures, Cahoon said he thinks the largest obstacle to ending the death penalty is that getting people on board can potentially require people to change the way they think about the entire criminal justice system.
“This need for vengeance meted out by our criminal justice system is a really powerful desire and it's something that people are raised with,” he said, “and asking people to reconsider that function of the criminal justice system is really hard. But I think it's a conversation we need to be having.”
Source: nola.com, Kaylee Poche, December 26, 2019
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
