Kansas’ death penalty is the ultimate failed big government program. Time to end it

The system is a pointless drain on state finances. Meanwhile, we keep discovering that innocent men have been wrongly sentenced to execution.

Imagine that well-meaning politicians created a government program that was supposed to help people. Now, imagine that same program getting 30 years of tax dollars and helping precisely nobody. Worse yet, imagine that the program’s mere existence actually hurts people in ways that no one originally considered.

That story is real, and it’s not the story of a progressive social experiment. Instead, this is the very true story of Kansas’ death penalty.

July 1 marked the 30th anniversary of the state’s modern era of capital punishment. Now, with 3 decades come and gone, it’s past time for Kansans to do an honest assessment of what capital punishment has and hasn’t brought to our state.

Many don’t even know that Kansas has the death penalty, and that’s because it has been more of an empty promise than actual reality for years. Only 15 people here have been sentenced to death since 1994, and there have been no new death sentences at all since 2016.

In some of those cases, the courts have only just completed the first set of state appeals. No cases whatsoever have finished state review and moved into federal court. Instead of being executed, these condemned men are seeing their sentences reversed or are dying of old age in prison.

Looking forward, lethal injection drugs will be extraordinarily hard, if not impossible to obtain because of pharmaceutical companies’ reluctance.

Kansas also hasn’t seen positive results from having the death penalty on the books. The public at large hasn’t benefited. Studies examining Kansas homicides have found no evidence that the death penalty deters murder. Society is no safer under these death sentences than with sentences of life without parole. Victims’ families have also not benefited. Instead of the closure available through a speedy trial, appeal and life sentence with no release, these families still face decades of appeals and legal challenges that are unique to death sentences.

Not only have the death penalty’s supposed benefits never materialized, but its harms are very real. Kansas’ public defender agency spends more than 12% of its budget on capital cases, but those cases account for less than 0.1% of the system’s caseload.

A recent state-specific study found that prosecutors and courts also bear significant additional expenses. This unnecessary spending could be redirected to victim services and efforts to make the judicial system fairer and more efficient.

Floyd Bledsoe, Lamonte McIntyre and Olin “Pete” Coones were all exonerated after being wrongfully convicted of murders that would be eligible for Kansas’ death penalty under current law.

200 WRONGFULLY CONVICTED INMATES EXONERATED

As long as we have the death penalty, we risk the irreparable harm of executing an innocent person. Kansas has already had 3 men — Floyd Bledsoe, Lamonte McIntyre and Olin “Pete” Coones — exonerated after being wrongfully convicted of murders that would be eligible for Kansas’ death penalty under current law.

Just months ago, another man was found not guilty of all charges after a capital murder trial in Topeka.

Nationwide, the U.S. just hit the astonishing milestone of its 200th exoneration of a death row inmate.

The moral harm that Kansans would suffer from a wrongful execution cannot be understated. July 1 marked 30 years of failure. If this were any other policy experiment, the death penalty would have been scrapped long ago. It is the ultimate failed big-government program. Everyone from every political party should agree that it’s time to move on and do things that actually work.

This past legislative session, because of projected problems in securing lethal injection drugs, Attorney General Kris Kobach asked the Legislature to authorize the suffocation of the men on death row by nitrogen hypoxia. He framed this troubling proposal as Kansas needing to decide whether it actually wanted the death penalty. When faced with that decision, 2 separate committees of elected leaders refused to move the bill forward.

Kansas legislators should finish the decision that they started making last year. A bipartisan legislative majority, along with Gov. Laura Kelly, is primed and ready to end this failed government program. Kansans should demand that murderers are punished severely but smartly through life without parole, and state House and Senate leadership should be brave enough to allow death penalty repeal to get a hearing and vote.

Source: kansascity.com, Opinion; Carolyn McGinn, August 14, 2024. Carolyn McGinn, a Wichita Republican, represents District 31 in the Kansas Senate. Kelson Bohnet is a capital trial lawyer in the Kansas public defender system and a board member for the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Kansas Coalition Against the Death Penalty.

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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

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