Death Penalty Debate Gains Momentum as States Consider Reform
by Ashley Matthews
Last week, the Washington Post reported that a Montana judge struck down the state’s lethal injection procedure, ruling that the three-drug cocktail used to execute death row inmates “increases the likelihood of confusion and error”. While the ruling does not prohibit state-mandated executions, all upcoming executions have been effectively suspended.
Photo Courtesy of LethalInjection.org
This decision comes after news that Californians will decide in November whether or not to replace capital punishment with life imprisonment, sans the possibility of parole. And death penalty opponents are getting support in unlikely places. From the Los Angeles Times:
If passed, the measure would make California the 18th state in the nation without a death penalty. During the last five years, four states have replaced the death penalty and Connecticut is soon to follow.
Growing numbers of conservatives in California have joined the effort to repeal the state’s capital punishment law, expressing frustration with its price tag and the rarity of executions. California has executed 13 inmates in 23 years, and prisoners are far more likely to die of old age on death row than by the executioner’s needle.
November’s ballot measure would commute the sentences of more than 700 people on death row to life without possibility of parole, a term that would then become the state’s most severe form of criminal punishment.
Most death row inmates would be returned to the general prison population and be expected to work. Their earnings would go to crime victims.
As the national debate heats up, death row inmates across the country are still using traditional methods to receive leniency, depending on a number of mitigating factors. For instance, a Pennsylvania death row inmate recently filed a petition for clemency because the jury in his case was never told at trial that he was sexually abused by the two men he later killed. If his appeal is rejected, he will be the first involuntarily executed inmate in Pennsylvania since the death penalty was reinstituted in the 1970s.
Interestingly enough, the ABA Journal noted that Judge Jeffrey Sherlock, the Montana judge who struck down lethal injection, called death row inmates “architects of their own doom”:
The second paragraph of Sherlock’s opinion (PDF) pointed out that the inmates were challenging the legal injection procedure, rather than the constitutionality of their death sentences. “Thus, ironically, plaintiffs ultimately do not seek to prevent the administration of the death penalty, but rather seek its administration in what they term to be a more humane and painless fashion,” Sherlock wrote. “In essence, plaintiffs are the architects of their own doom. It is also ironic to note that the plaintiffs who, if their sentences mean anything, are strangers to the concepts of mercy and obedience to the law, yet they seek the law’s protection. However, the Montana Constitution protects all people in Montana, even those who may appear undeserving of such protection.”