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Washington state to suspend death penalty by governor's moratorium Washington state to suspend death penalty by governor's moratorium
(about 4 hours later)
Governor Jay Inslee said Tuesday he was suspending the use of the death penalty in Washington state, announcing a move that he hopes will enable officials to “join a growing national conversation about capital punishment”. The Washington governor, Jay Inslee, has suspended the use of the death penalty in the state during his time in office.
The Democrat said he came to the decision after months of review, meetings with family members of victims, prosecutors and law enforcement. “Equal justice under the law is the state’s primary responsibility. And in death penalty cases I’m not convinced equal justice is being served,” said the first-term Democrat. “The use of the death penalty in this state is unequally applied, sometimes dependent on the budget of the county where the crime occurred.”
“There have been too many doubts raised about capital punishment, there are too many flaws in this system today,” Inslee said at a news conference. “There is too much at stake to accept an imperfect system.” While crediting the “good protections built into Washington state’s death penalty law”, Inslee said “there have been too many doubts raised about capital punishment” as well as “too many flaws in the system”.
Inslee said that the use of the death penalty is inconsistent and unequal. The governor’s staff briefed lawmakers about the move on Monday night and Tuesday morning. Although he visited the Washington state Penitentiary in Walla Walla, an agricultural, wine tourism and college town in eastern Washington, Inslee said his decision was not about the nine men who were on death row there for horrific rapes and murders of victims as young as three years old.
Inslee’s moratorium, which will be in place for as long as he is governor, means that if a death penalty case comes to his desk, he will issue a reprieve, which isn’t a pardon and doesn’t commute the sentences of those condemned to death. “I don’t question their guilt or the gravity of their crimes,” he said. “They get no mercy from me.”
“During my term, we will not be executing people,” said Inslee, who was elected in 2012. “Nobody is getting out of prison, period.” His decision on Tuesday to issue a moratorium on executions in Washington does not mean death row inmates will receive pardons or commuted sentences; they will remain in prison for life.
Last year, Maryland abolished the death penalty, the 18th state to do so and the sixth in the last six years. This would cost the state less, Inslee said, due in part to the tremendous legal fees involved in managing trials and an appeals process that has overturned 60% of the 32 capital offence convictions issued since 1981 in Washington state.
Nine men await execution at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla. The state supreme court just last month rejected a petition for release from death row inmate Jonathan Lee Gentry, sentenced for the murder of a 12-year-old girl in 1988. Gentry could be the first execution in the state since September 2010, when Cal Coburn Brown died by lethal injection for the 1991 murder of a Seattle-area woman. A federal stay had recently been lifted in Gentry’s case, and a remaining state stay on his execution was expected to be lifted this month. “Basically the death penalty is very costly – lifetime incarceration without parole is less expensive,” said Kathleen Taylor, the executive director of the ACLU of Washington, which supports Inslee’s decision. “Also it’s applied unevenly – people with less income and less money to spend on their defence are more likely to get the death penalty, and whether or not someone gets the death penalty can depend on which county their crime occurs in.”
The decision by the governor comes following a recent decision by the state Department of Corrections, which is in the process of changing its execution protocol to allow witnesses to executions to see the entire process, including the insertion of intravenous catheters during a lethal injection. The Washington state senator Kirk Pearson (R-Monroe) serves on the law and justice committee, which he said was not consulted prior to Inslee’s announcement.
The new witness protocol, currently a draft that is in its final stages of approval, includes the use of television monitors to show the inmate entering the death chamber and being strapped down, as well as the insertion of the IVs, which had both previously been shielded from public view. “It’s an insult to the families of victims who have died heinous deaths at the hands of those sitting on death row,” Pearson said of Inslee’s decision. “We have people who have committed horrible crimes and families that need closure. With this there is no closure.”
Through public disclosure requests, the Associated Press had sought information about any potential changes to the execution protocols. State corrections officials spoke with the AP about the new procedures late last month. Citing the state supreme court justice Charles Johnson, who wrote in 2006 that the death penalty randomly strikes “some offenders and not others”, Inslee said the death penalty had not been shown to deter murder and was not always applied to the “most heinous offenders”.
The change is in response to a 2012 federal appeals court ruling that said all parts of an execution must be fully open to public witnesses. That ruling was sparked by a case brought by the AP and other news organizations who challenged Idaho’s policy to shield the insertion of IV catheters from public view, in spite of a 2002 ruling from the same court that said every aspect of an execution should be open to witnesses. Unless a legislative measure is passed to abolish the death penalty in Washington state, which would be the 19th state to do so, Inslee’s decision may not hold once he has left office and it does not prevent men convicted of capital offences from appealing against their convictions.
The Kitsap county prosecutor, Russ Hauge, has been pursuing the death penalty for inmate Jonathan Lee Gentry, who was sent to death row in 1988 for the murder of a 12-year-old girl.
“The governor’s announcement didn’t really change anything,” Hauge said. “It’s not going to change our workload or our obligations in any way. Since Mr Gentry has never accepted responsibility for his crime we must maintain our part of the action or there is the chance we would lose the conviction.”
Hauge said that in his conversations with the governor it had never been suggested that prosecutors were exercising their discretion unfairly, but rather that some counties did not have the budget to pursue the death penalty, which could result in millions of dollars in costs per case. “Smaller counties would be looking at a potential bill for death penalty prosecution in the nature of their general county’s entire budget,” he said. “The financial considerations are real.”
Still, Hauge said, Inslee’s decision did not change the legislative mandate that “in the right cases, prosecutors seek the death penalty. In net effect what Inslee is saying is that ‘while I’m governor I am going to hold up actual execution of the sentence’. But it doesn’t change anything else about the process.”