Pennsylvania | Advocates push to end death penalty as moratorium continues

Gov. Josh Shapiro issued his 1st death penalty reprieve earlier this month, as advocates for abolishing capital punishment say the political winds continue to shift slowly in their favor. 

The reprieve — issued Dec. 5 with little fanfare — fulfills Shapiro’s promise to maintain the moratorium on executions that began under his predecessor, Tom Wolf. Both governors said they would not carry out any death sentences, asking the legislature to pass sentencing reform that includes eliminating the death penalty. 

Shapiro “is taking the kind of leadership that we expect people with a strong moral compass and a strong understanding of public policy” to be assuming, Robert Dunham, founder of the Death Penalty Policy Project, said at a news briefing this week. 

In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision that forced most states to rewrite their death penalty statutes. Pennsylvania re-established the death penalty in 1978, but since that time has only executed three people, the most recent one being in 1999. 

After a jury sentences a person to death, the governor is presented with a warrant setting the date of execution. If the governor does not sign, the Secretary of Corrections must alternatively issue a notice of execution. Since 1985, a total of 482 warrants or notices have been issued in Pennsylvania, according to the Department of Corrections (DOC) — but with the aforementioned three exceptions, none have been carried out. 

In the majority of cases, the death sentence was stayed or overturned by an appeals court. In the handful of situations where no further adjudication is expected, the governor has issued a reprieve to prevent execution. Shortly after taking office in 2015, Wolf said he would always issue a reprieve, citing the frequency with which capital sentences were overturned and the permanence of death. He ultimately issued eight reprieves during his time in office. 

Shapiro had previously supported the death penalty, but upon taking office in 2023 said that his views had evolved during his time as the state’s attorney general, and that he would continue Wolf’s policy. 

In his 1st reprieve, Shapiro reiterated that message, writing that his time as attorney general “revealed two undeniable truths about our capital sentencing system: that it is inherently fallible and that its consequences are irreversible.” 

Although those sentenced to death “have committed the most terrible crimes and deserve to spend the rest of their lives behind bars,” Shapiro wrote, the commonwealth “should not be in the business of executing people.” 

The reprieve was made with virtually no publicity. A two-sentence notice appears on the DOC website stating that Corrections Secretary Laurel Harry, on Dec. 5, issued an execution notice for inmate Richard Roland Laird. The DOC’s death sentence list shows a reprieve was signed by Shapiro the same day. 

Laird and his accomplice were convicted in the 1987 abduction and killing of Anthony Milano in Bucks County. Prosecutors said Laird had encountered Milano the night of the murder at a bar, and had hurled homophobic insults at the victim, who was gay, before kidnapping him and cutting his throat. 

The hate crime grabbed national attention. Laird was sentenced to death in 1988, but multiple layers of appeals and re-adjudication have taken over 37 years – not an uncommon situation, with the DOC’s list of current death row inmates containing several individuals with convictions even older than Laird’s. 

While both Wolf and Shapiro have pushed for the legislature to repeal the death penalty, the issue remains mostly intractable. 

In 2023, the judiciary committee of the Democratic-majority state House passed a bill to end capital punishment, but the measure never moved for a full House vote, and the likelihood of agreement with the GOP-majority Senate remains slim. Notably, however, a new version of the repeal bill in the House has an increased number of Republicans signed on in support. 

The issue continues to be a political flashpoint across the country. As Dunham and several others noted at their briefing this week, the number of death sentences handed down nationwide has been on a broad decline – but the number of people actually put to death has recently gone up, due almost entirely to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis carrying out a string of executions. 

Two undeniable truths about our capital sentencing system: it is inherently fallible and its consequences are irreversible.

In Pennsylvania, Washington County District Attorney Jason Walsh is also facing a lawsuit arguing that he has pursued the death penalty in an unusually large number of cases for political reasons. The plaintiffs’ filings include an allegation from the county coroner that Walsh pressured him into declaring a child’s death a homicide because “I need to win an election” by pursuing the death penalty against the child’s father. Walsh has disputed this characterization. 

“This is the kind of misconduct that leads to increasing public distrust for capital punishment, and I think that it will continue the national trend that we’re seeing away from support for the death penalty,” Dunham said. 

Gallup polling earlier this year showed 52% of Americans favor allowing the death penalty for murder cases, part of a broad decline from a peak of 80% support in 1994. 

Polling of Pennsylvania voters from Susquehanna Polling & Research – commissioned this year by the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation and Pennsylvanians Against the Death Penalty – found that 29% of respondents preferred capital punishment to a life sentence, a marked decrease from 42% in a similar question in 2015. The survey also revealed that 66% of Democrats and 49% of Republicans believed the government could not be trusted to apply the death penalty fairly, Dunham noted. 

A review by the Death Penalty Information Center found that, between 1978 and 2018, 170 death row prisoners in Pennsylvania had their sentence or the entire conviction thrown out. Of these, 137 cases were fully re-tried or re-sentenced, 133 of which resulted in the sentence being downgraded or the condemned being completely exonerated. 

Even after a sentence or conviction is overturned, “the trauma remains,” said Akin Adepoju, a board member of Pennsylvanians Against the Death Penalty. “Jobs are lost, opportunities are gone, relationships are strained, trust is broken. And that is the sort of real, lasting legacy of the death penalty for everyone from the jurors to the individuals who are really living through it.”

Source: The Bradford Era, Staff, December 24, 2025

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde