Despite Ineffectiveness as Public-Safety Tool, Anti-Abolition Lawmakers Push Bills to Reinstate Death Penalty for Killings of Police Officers

Despite the absence of evi­dence that the death penal­ty pro­tects police or pro­motes pub­lic safe­ty, law­mak­ers in sev­er­al states that have abol­ished cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment have intro­duced bills to rein­state cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment for the mur­ders of police officers.

An attempt dur­ing the 2022 leg­isla­tive ses­sion in Virginia to rein­state the death penal­ty for killings of police offi­cers failed in com­mit­tee. The state abol­ished the death penal­ty in February 2021, and a bill to nar­row­ly rein­state the state’s death penal­ty for mur­ders of law enforce­ment offi­cers was vot­ed down in a 9 – 6 vote by the Senate Judiciary Committee on February 7, 2022. A com­pan­ion bill died with­out con­sid­er­a­tion in a House committee.

Several leg­is­la­tors in Illinois have intro­duced bills that would rein­state the death penal­ty for the killings of police offi­cers, fire­fight­ers, and oth­er first respon­ders in response to what they char­ac­ter­ized as a spate of killings of police offi­cers. State Senator Darren Bailey, who is run­ning for the Republican nom­i­na­tion for gov­er­nor against incum­bent Democrat JB Pritzer, intro­duced his bill on January 21, 2022. In rhetoric rem­i­nis­cent of the politi­ciza­tion of crime in the 1980s and 1990s, Bailey claimed that “[l]aw enforce­ment is under attack and it’s because here in Illinois, Springfield has failed them. … We have to make it clear we have our offi­cers’ backs. An attack against our offi­cers is an assault against the safe­ty and secu­ri­ty of our com­mu­ni­ties,” he said.

Asserting that ​“we’ve had not only an increase in crime but an increase in killing of cops in the state of Illinois,” State Representative Dave Severin intro­duced a House ver­sion of the bill on January 24, 2022. ​“We have got to make a change in the state of Illinois for it to be safer for cor­rec­tion­al offi­cers, for police offi­cers and this killing has got to stop,” Severin said.

Former Illinois Innocence Project Director John Hanlon took issue with the leg­is­la­tors’ asser­tions. ​“The sta­tis­tics are real­ly clear: the death penal­ty does not serve as a deter­rent,” he said. ​“Deterrence is a log­i­cal thought process,” Hanlon, who rep­re­sent­ed sev­er­al Illinois death-row pris­on­ers on appeal, said. “[V]ery often, crimes at this lev­el — there’s not a whole lot of log­i­cal think­ing going on. So deter­rence doesn’t occur — it doesn’t apply.”

A 2017 Death Penalty Information Center analy­sis of thir­ty years of FBI data on mur­ders in the United States and mur­ders of law enforce­ment per­son­nel killed in the line of duty found that the pres­ence or absence of the death penal­ty had no effect on either mur­der rates gen­er­al­ly or the rates at which law enforce­ment offi­cers were killed. In a pod­cast describ­ing the find­ings, DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham explained, ​“There’s no evi­dence that the death penal­ty deters mur­der and there’s no evi­dence that it pro­tects the police.” The death penal­ty, Dunham said, ​“makes no mea­sur­able con­tri­bu­tion” to police safety.

The DPIC Homicide Study

DPIC looked at the mur­der data through the lens­es of states that had the death penal­ty through­out the study peri­od, states that had long abol­ished the death penal­ty, and ​“tran­si­tion­al” states that recent­ly abol­ished the death penal­ty. The data showed that police offi­cers were killed in the line of duty at a rate that was 1.37 times high­er in states that had the death penal­ty than in states that had long abol­ished the death penal­ty. The states in which police were killed at the high­est rates were dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly death penal­ty states. (Click to enlarge graph­ic.) In every state, killings of police offi­cers rep­re­sent­ed a tiny per­cent­age of all mur­ders and, con­trary to what one would expect if the death penal­ty made police safer, they account­ed for vir­tu­al­ly the same per­cent­age of mur­ders (0.33%) in both states with the death penal­ty and long-time abo­li­tion­ist states. They account­ed for a much small­er per­cent­age of mur­ders (0.20%) in the tran­si­tion­al states that had most recent­ly abol­ished the death penalty.

The study’s Illinois data also found that Illinois has had peri­od­ic spikes in mur­ders of police offi­cers, but hav­ing the death penal­ty for police killings did noth­ing to pre­vent them. (See graph­ic.) Killings of police offi­cers declined in the years imme­di­ate­ly after the state abol­ished cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, although DPIC con­clud­ed that, too, had noth­ing to do with the death penalty.

The DPIC study also found that exe­cu­tions had no observ­able impact on offi­cer safe­ty. Eight of the 9 safest states for law enforce­ment — Vermont, Iowa, Connecticut, Maine, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware, and Massachusetts — did not have or had recent­ly abol­ished the death penal­ty. The ninth, Wyoming, had no one on death row and had not car­ried out any exe­cu­tions in 30 years.