Pennsylvania Should Join the Rest of the Northeastern States and Abolish the Death Penalty

Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York—name a Northeastern state, and you will be naming a place where there is no death penalty. New Hampshire was the latest to join the list in 2019. 

But there is one glaring omission. 

Pennsylvania. In the Keystone State, capital punishment is legal, even though no one has been executed there since 1999. The state exists in a kind of death penalty limbo, not abolishing it but unable or unwilling to carry out death sentences. 

Recent polls suggest that the residents of Pennsylvania are ready to break the logjam. 58% now favor a life sentence rather than the death penalty for people convicted of murder. 

It is long past time for Pennsylvania to do what Josh Shapiro, its current governor, has urged it to do, namely, get out of “the business of putting people to death.” And while its state legislature again considers abolition bills, Governor Shapiro should be working on a plan to commute the sentences of the more than one hundred people on death row. 

Neither will be easy to accomplish. But what Pennsylvania does with its death penalty will make a big difference in the national debate about capital punishment. 

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania’s death penalty system displays all the flaws and injustices that afflict such systems everywhere. Let’s start with its unreliability. 

The Reason Foundation reports that “since 1995, Pennsylvania has exonerated 13 individuals from death row. The average Pennsylvania exoneree spent more than 16 years wrongly sentenced to death, and the longest wait for exoneration was 29 years. 12 of those 13 exonerations involved official misconduct, 11 involved perjury or false accusations, and 7 involved inadequate legal representation.” 

That report highlights problems with the state’s indigent defense system, which until recently received no state funding, “leaving public defender services to be funded entirely at the county level. State funding for indigent defense now exists, but that reform is only 3 years old and does not inspire confidence that the quality of capital representation in the commonwealth has been materially strengthened.” 

Studies have also shown stark racial disparities in death sentencing in Pennsylvania, with the race of the victim traditionally being an important factor in explaining the outcomes of capital trials. Moreover, more than 60% of those on death row are people of color, even though over 80% of the state’s population is white. 

The Pennsylvania Capital-Star quotes Francis Harvey, the interim executive director of the Atlantic Center for Capital Representation, who contends that "death sentences in the commonwealth are reserved, not for the worst of the worst of the worst, but for the poorest of the poor, for people with serious mental illnesses and intellectual disability and cases where the victim’s life is valued more than other lives, that is, cases with white victims.” 

And then there is the impact of geography. If someone commits a capital crime in Philadelphia, Allegheny, York, or Berks Counties, they are much more likely to get a death sentence than if they commit the same crime elsewhere in the state. 

More than a decade ago, former Governor Tom Wolf acknowledged those problems, calling the state’s death penalty system “flawed…ineffective, unjust, and expensive.” As a result, in 2015, Wolf imposed a moratorium on executions. 

At the time, as Robert Dunham, then Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center, observed, the moratorium “doesn’t put the death penalty on hold in the state… It only means that executions will not be carried out.” 

Nonetheless, Pennsylvania prosecutors went to court to try to invalidate Wolf’s moratorium, claiming it was not a legitimate exercise of his power to grant reprieves. But the state supreme court sided with Wolf. 

“At the time the reprieve power was adopted in the 1790 Constitution,” the court explained, “the Governor’s authority to issue a reprieve was not understood as being limited to granting reprieves with a specific end date or for a purpose relating only to the prisoner’s unique circumstances, but rather encompassed any temporary postponement of sentence.” 

In February 2023, Wolf’s newly minted successor, Governor Josh Shapiro, announced that he would continue Wolf’s policy of refusing to sign any execution warrants while he was in office. At the same time, he went beyond Wolf in calling on the state legislature to abolish the death penalty. 

Shapiro described his personal journey from a death penalty proponent to an abolitionist. “For more than a decade, including when I assumed office as Attorney General, I believed that the death penalty should be reserved for the most heinous crimes—but that it was, indeed, a just punishment for those crimes….” 

“However,” he continued, “[w]hen my son asked me why it as [sic] OK to kill someone as a punishment for killing someone, I couldn’t look him in the eye and explain why.” 

Shapiro then said, “Pennsylvania should do what 25 other states have done in outlawing the death penalty or refusing to impose it—including many of our neighbors, such as New Jersey, Maryland, and West Virginia. This must be bigger than studying this issue or reviewing the system. We shouldn’t aim to just fix the system. The Commonwealth shouldn’t be in the business of putting people to death. Period.” 

“That’s why today,” he added, “I’m respectfully calling on the General Assembly to work with me to abolish the death penalty in Pennsylvania—once and for all.”

Now, more than 3 years later, Pennsylvania remains an anomaly among its neighboring states. While we know that in our federal system, states often imitate one another, paying close attention to what is happening in nearby states, the Pennsylvania legislature has not yet followed that pattern with respect to capital punishment. 

Part of the reason is that Pennsylvania has had and used the death penalty for a very long time. Its execution history dates back to the early 1600s. 

And as the Death Penalty Information Center reports, from then until 1976, “a total of 1,040 people were executed in the Keystone State.” In the last 50 years, however, “only 3 executions have actually been carried out.” 

At the end of April, 2 bills that would abolish Pennsylvania’s death penalty advanced in its Democratic-controlled House of Representatives. They would replace capital punishment with life without parole for 1st-degree murder. 

Yet with a Republican majority in the State Senate, prospects for passage of those bills are not great. 

That puts Governor Shapiro in a bind. It may be that the only way he can advance the abolitionist cause would be if he could commute the sentences of everyone on death row. 

But here again, the odds are long. In Pennsylvania, a governor can only commute a death sentence if the 5-member Board of Pardons unanimously recommends it. That helps explain why there have been no capital clemencies in the last 50 years. 

For the moment at least, the Keystone State seems likely to remain a regional outlier when it comes to capital punishment. Governor Shapiro should do everything in his power to change that before he leaves office. 

Source: verdict.justia.com, Austin Sarat, July 8, 2026. Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College.

"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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