EDITORIALS: ​“At Some Point, A Death Penalty Stops Making Sense”

The Witchita Eagle recently called on Kansas lawmakers to reconsider the death penalty, stating: “At some point, given the legal problems and the lack of executions, a death penalty stops making sense for Kansas.” The paper said the law has cost taxpayers millions of dollars without the benefit of deterring crime. Moreover, the state has not had a single execution since capital punishment was reinstated in 1994, and the “care and caution” warranted to protect against wrongful convictions could mean the state’s first execution is more than a decade away.

The editorial follows:

It’s hard to imagine that any of the 89 Kansas lawmakers who voted in 1994 to revive the death penalty for the “the worst of the worst” criminals anticipated it would still be unused come 2007. Each year sends more men to Kansas’ death row, nine in all currently, but the legal challenges to their sentences continue at a glacial pace. Then there is the cost to taxpayers, averaging $1.2 million each by one tally. At some point, given the legal problems and the lack of executions, a death penalty stops making sense for Kansas.

In the early ’90s, the average time between sentencing to execution nationally was eight years; now, it’s 16 years. And Jeff Jackson, a law professor at Washburn University, recently predicted that Kansas’ first execution since reinstatement of capital punishment could be another dozen years away. If that killer ends up being Gary Kleypas — the first man so sentenced in Kansas since serial killers James Latham and George York were hanged on June 22, 1965 — 23 years could have passed since his 1996 rape and murder of a Pittsburg State University student.

That would hardly seem to count as swift punishment, or fulfill legislative intent.

Supporters will point to Texas’ eight-year average gap and 402 executionssince 1974 and ask of Kansas: What’s the holdup?

First Kleypas must be resentenced, as ordered by the Kansas Supreme Court. Another denizen of death row must be retried entirely — Michael Marsh of Wichita, whose 1996 case was involved in the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2006 decision upholding Kansas’ death penalty. The appeal of Gavin Scott, sentenced to die for killing a rural Goddard couple in 1996, was heard last week by the state’s Supreme Court, where the defense argued that the word “or” in the phrase “cruel or unusual” punishment allows the court to strike down the death penalty law again. Meanwhile, the appeals of some of the best-known killers — including Jonathan and Reginald Carr, Douglas Belt and John E. Robinson Sr. —are still to come.

The proliferation of murders in Wichita this year — 37 and counting, compared with 26 for all of 2006 — casts increasing doubt on the death penalty’s value as a deterrent. So do the state’s pending capital cases against Edwin R. Hall, charged with killing Olathe teen Kelsey Smith; Justin Thurber, charged in the Cowley County death of 19-year-old Jodi Sanderholm; and Elgin Ray Robinson Jr., facing capital murder charges in the death of 14-year-old Wichitan Chelsea Brooks.

Plus, more complications lie ahead: The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that killers sentenced to die by lethal injection, the preferred method in Kansas and 37 other states, can challenge the constitutionality of that method of execution.

There are many other good reasons for a rethinking, including the recent principled argument of Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., that capital punishment is only apt in a very few “cases where we cannot protect the society from the individual.”

Care and caution are warranted to ensure that only the guilty are subjected to the ultimate punishment. But as difficult as the 1994 legislative debate was, it should lead to another any day now — about whether the death penalty, given its complexities and cost, is still worth having in Kansas.

(Wichita Eagle, September 13, 2007). See Editorials, Costs, and Deterrence.