'Better off without it': Washington closes execution chamber at state penitentiary

WASHINGTON STATE — Fourteen years after the last death sentence was carried out in Washington, the execution chamber at the state penitentiary in Walla Walla was closed in a ceremony held Wednesday morning.

Gov. Jay Inslee, who issued a moratorium on the death penalty ten years ago, said shuttering the chamber was the ‘final closure’ of the controversial issue in Washington state law.

“I do think it’s a moment in time that having some physical evidence of our progress as a state is important,” Inslee said as he toured the chamber with reporters and prison administrators. "This is a weighty decision involving the relationship of the state government with its citizens.”

The current execution chamber opened in 1904 and was the site of 78 executions in its history.

Washington used two methods of execution over the years – hanging and lethal injection.

The hooks remain in the gallows on the second floor of the chamber, with the marks from the ropes that were used to hang the condemned. On the first level of the chamber, the execution gurney remains in place with straps and belts where the condemned would be given a lethal injection. A small stool sits underneath the gurney where the condemned would climb onto the table.

Around 15 observation chairs also remain in the chamber, with the front row reserved for families of the victims. Prison inmates made a plaque that was installed on the wall of the chamber, commemorating the closure.

The three clocks in the execution chamber are all set to 12:56, the time when the last execution was carried out on Cal Coburn Brown in September of 2010.

Brown raped, strangled, and stabbed 22-year-old Holly Washa in 1993.

Former King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg, whose office prosecuted Brown for the murder, observed the execution alongside Washa’s family.

“We watched him die, and Holly’s sister turned to me and said, ‘Now we don’t have to think about him anymore,” Satterberg told KOMO News in an interview this week. “I realized that for the last two decades, this family had lived with the possibility that some court somewhere was going to let him out, and we were going to have to do the trial again.”

Satterberg said after witnessing the execution, he believed the state needed to do away with the death penalty.

“My conclusion is ‘it’s just not worth it. We’re better off without it,” he said. “People fantasize about the death penalty they wish we had in this state, not the one we actually had.”

Because county governments have to pay the cost to prosecute and provide a defense for death penalty cases, only a few counties in the state have the resources to pursue the death penalty.

Inslee pointed out this disparity during remarks at the prison on Wednesday, noting that a capital offense on one side of a county line could lead to a death penalty sentence, while it wouldn’t go beyond life in prison if committed in another county.

“No matter what we believe about the criminal justice system, we want it to be equally applied,” Inslee said.

The Washington Department of Corrections plans to keep the execution chamber intact for now.

“For now, it’s ok to keep it there to say ‘this was a failed criminal justice experiment, and we’re better than that. We’ve moved past that,'” Satterberg said. “[The execution chamber] hadn’t been used very often, but it had been promised all the time – that this was going make us safer. ‘This room, what was going to happen in this room was going to make us safer.’ It set up expectations that this would happen quickly and be fair - none of those promises were kept.”

In 2014, Inslee issued a moratorium on the death penalty. In 2018, Washington's Supreme Court unanimously struck down the death penalty,calling it arbitrary and racially biased.

In 2023, the state legislature officially removed the death penalty from state law with Senate Bill 5087.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 23 states have abolished the death penalty, and six states have paused executions through executive action. Twenty-one states still have the death penalty.

Satterberg, the former King County Prosecuting Attorney,believes the death penalty will be abolished nationwide in the next decade.

“Having lived with it for more than three decades and trying to make it work, I know it just collapsed under its own weight here,” Satterberg said. “Too expensive, too slow, and not helpful to the victims at all and really an impediment to the entire criminal justice system. It’s gone, good riddance, seal it up. We can talk about it, and we can watch the rest of the country struggle with it."

Source: komonews.com, J. Harris, September 19, 2024

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