Following Washington Death Penalty Abolition, Op-eds Encourage Other States to Follow Suit

Following the Washington Supreme Court’s October 11, 2018 decision declaring the state’s death penalty unconstitutional, news outlets have questioned what comes next. Op-ed writers in North Carolina, Texas, and California have responded, urging their states to reconsider their capital punishment laws. The Washington court cited racial bias, “arbitrary decision-making, random imposition of the death penalty, unreliability, geographic rarity, and excessive delays” as reasons why it struck down the death penalty. In a guest column in the Sacramento Bee, University of California Berkeley School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky wrote, “California’s death penalty suffers the same flaws and likewise should be struck down.” Similarly, Kristin Collins, Associate Director of Public Information at the Center for Death Penalty Litigation, wrote in a commentary for the North Carolina blog, The Progressive Pulse, “[i]f those are reasons to outlaw the death penalty, then it is surely time for the North Carolina death penalty to go.” Writing in the Austin American-Statesman, University of Texas sociology professor William R. Kelly observed: “In light of the ever-present potential for error and bias, the absence of a deterrent effect and the extraordinary cost to prosecute, appeal and execute someone, we are left with the basic question: Is the death penalty worth it? It’s a question more states ought to ask.”

Collins and Chemerinsky pointed to systemic problems in their respective states that they say provide reasons to repeal the death penalty or declare their capital punishment statutes unconstitutional. Collins said a September 2018 study by the Center for Death Penalty Litigation revealed that “most of the people on N.C. death row are only there because they had the bad luck to be tried under outdated laws, before there were basic legal protections to ensure fairness at their trials.” “Had they been tried under modern laws,” she wrote, “most wouldn’t be on death row today.” Chemerinsky highlighted the lengthy delays in California’s death-penalty system and the large body of evidence showing that the state’s death penalty is discriminatorily applied. Quoting federal Judge Cormac Carney’s summary of the state of California’s death row, he wrote: “Indeed, for most, systemic delay has made their execution so unlikely that the death sentence carefully and deliberately imposed by the jury has been quietly transformed into one no rational jury or legislature could ever impose: life in prison, with the remote possibility of death.” These types of problems “and the fact that the death penalty is extraordinarily expensive and does not do much to deter violent crime,” Professor Kelly wrote, “may help propel other states to abolish it.”