With little fuss or fanfare, capital punishment is dying.
Surprisingly, hard-boiled local prosecutors around the country, many of them death-penalty supporters, are leading the way. Executions are a luxury their counties and clogged court dockets can no longer afford.
Murder rates also have dropped. And at least 185 U.S. prisoners on death-row, including 10 from Pennsylvania, have been exonerated since 1973, making prosecutors increasingly mindful of horrifying and exorbitant errors.
Traditionally, prosecutors have touted capital cases to bolster their tough-on-crime credentials. The intense scrutiny now given them reflect the indefensible costs and risks of capital punishment, along with its dubious benefits.
Capital punishment does not deter violent crime. In fact, murder rates are higher in death-penalty states. Furthermore, most death-penalty convictions are overturned on appeal for mandatory life sentences.
By any measure, the death penalty is simply not worth the costs, especially in Pennsylvania, which has, since 1976, sentenced more than 400 prisoners to death – at an estimated cost of up to $800 million – resulting in only three executions.
Annual U.S. executions peaked at 98 in 1999, before steadily declining, the Death Penalty Information Center reports. With public support waning, executions fell to 17 in 2020, including 10 federal executions, the first in 17 years.
Likewise, capital cases and convictions have decreased. In the mid-1990s, U.S. courts imposed more than 300 death-row sentences a year; last year, the number dropped to 18 .
A growing number of newly elected reform prosecutors, such as Larry Krasner in Philadelphia, will help ensure capital cases and executions continue to decline.
Coerced testimony leads to exonerations
In Pennsylvania, prosecutors continue to charge under the state’s death-penalty statute, despite the moratorium on executions Gov. Tom Wolf imposed in 2015. Even so, the costs of trying capital cases and defending convictions have restrained death penalty charges, Greg Rowe, executive director of the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association, said Friday.
“Prosecutors are giving those cases very careful scrutiny,” said Rowe, whose organization represents 66 of Pennsylvania’s 67 district attorneys. “They’re making sure they’re truly the worst of the worst, and that victims understand the appeals process in state and federal courts will take a long time.”
Despite fewer death-penalty cases, however, some prosecutors have used the law to wrest guilty pleas from defendants to lesser charges, a blatantly unethical practice that can strong-arm suspects and witnesses to implicate innocent people.
Coerced false testimony has cost Pennsylvania taxpayers millions of dollars. In Philadelphia, settlements since 2018, involving the use or threat of the death penalty, amounted to more than $16 million, an investigation by the Philadelphia Inquirer found. In May, Theophalis Wilson sued Philadelphia, after a Conviction Integrity Unit showed the prosecution’s lead witness was threatened with the death penalty.
Death penalty more unusual
Capital punishment is kept alive, chiefly, by a few counties whose despicable appetite for executions inures them to the death penalty’s systemic and well-documented flaws. More than half of the nation’s death-row prisoners come from roughly 1 percent of U.S. counties.
Since 2009, seven states have abolished the death penalty. The U.S. Supreme Court also has banned the death penalty for juveniles and people with disabilities.
For U.S. capital punishment to end, however, legislators in 27 remaining death-penalty states must abolish it. Pennsylvania legislators have introduced a bill to do so, but Gov. Wolf must become more engaged to push it through the General Assembly.
The U.S. Supreme Court could also declare capital punishment unconstitutional. As executions decline, they become, by definition, more unusual, and a more likely violation of the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Capital punishment is incompatible with an enlightened society or contemporary standards of decency, making the United States a moral outlier among nations. It offers no benefits to society, only fantasies of deterrence and delusions of vengeance. The atavistic impulses stirred by government-sponsored killing are best left to the graveyards of history.
Ironically, local prosecutors making mundane but pragmatic charging decisions have recently done the most to end capital punishment. Now elected officials should straighten their spines and finish the job.
Source: tahlequahdailypress.com, Jeff Gerritt, July 28, 2021. Jeff Gerritt is the editor of the Sharon Herald in Pennsylvania.
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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
