Legislators Plan New Attempt to Repeal Utah Capital Punishment Law, as Prominent County Attorney Announces He Will No Longer Seek the Death Penalty

Efforts to end the death penal­ty in Utah edged for­ward on September 8, 2021 as two Republican leg­is­la­tors revealed plans to intro­duce leg­is­la­tion to ​“repeal and replace” the state’s cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment law and the pros­e­cut­ing attor­ney in the state’s sec­ond most pop­u­lous coun­ty declared that he would no longer seek the death penal­ty in future cases.

After what they describe as hav­ing ​“spir­i­tu­al­ly con­tem­plat­ed the issue,” for­mer death-penal­ty sup­port­ers State Representative Lowry Snow (R – St. George) and State Senator Daniel McCay (R – Riverton) announced that they will be spon­sor­ing a bill in the 2022 leg­isla­tive ses­sion that would repeal Utah’s death penal­ty statute and estab­lish a new sen­tence of 45 years to life in prison for aggra­vat­ed mur­der. Their pro­posed leg­is­la­tion would apply to mur­der charges brought on or after May 4, 2022 and would not affect the sen­tences of the sev­en pris­on­ers cur­rent­ly on Utah’s death row. Also on September 8, Utah County Attorney David O. Leavitt (pic­tured), a con­ser­v­a­tive advo­cate of crim­i­nal legal reform, announced that his office would not ini­ti­ate any fur­ther capital prosecutions. 

Snow and McCay informed the edi­to­r­i­al boards of the Deseret News and KSL-TV that the finan­cial and emo­tion­al price the death penal­ty exact­ed from tax­pay­ers and vic­tims’ fam­i­lies had changed their minds about cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. ​“It sets a false expec­ta­tion for soci­ety, sets a false expec­ta­tion for the vic­tims and their fam­i­lies, and increas­es the cost to the state of Utah and for states that still have cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment,” McCay said. 

In a motion filed in a Utah County tri­al court, Leavitt with­drew the notice of intent to seek the death penal­ty he had filed two years ear­li­er against Jerrod Baum on two counts of aggra­vat­ed mur­der. The coun­ty attor­ney also released a press state­ment and video to the pub­lic say­ing that “[t]he resources that I’ve com­mit­ted to seek­ing the death penal­ty have lim­it­ed this office’s abil­i­ty to assist and care for vic­tims of oth­er crimes. … Today, I announce that as the Utah County Attorney, I will no longer seek the death penalty.”

“Pretending that the death penal­ty will some­how curb crime is sim­ply a lie,” Leavitt said. ​“What I have wit­nessed and expe­ri­enced since decid­ing to seek the death penal­ty is that regard­less of the crime, seek­ing the death penal­ty does NOT pro­mote our safety.”

Snow said he was affect­ed by the ​“incred­i­bly mov­ing” sto­ry of his con­stituent, Sharon Wright Weeks, whose sis­ter and niece were mur­dered by severe­ly men­tal­ly ill cult leader Ronald Lafferty. Weeks, Snow said, was ​“retrau­ma­tized” by hav­ing to relive the mur­ders in Lafferty’s first tri­al and then again in a retri­al after his con­vic­tion was over­turned. Lafferty ulti­mate­ly died on death row. 

“You can imag­ine if you’re a fam­i­ly and if the per­pe­tra­tor is con­vict­ed in a first tri­al, sen­tenced to die. It’s set aside. It’s reversed. (It) has to come back for a whole oth­er tri­al. You can imag­ine the anx­i­ety of hav­ing to sit through that pro­ceed­ing again. And that’s real­ly, in some respects, only the begin­ning,” Snow said. ​“That’s well over 30 years, prob­a­bly clos­er to 35 years, where the state of Utah was not able to find jus­tice for this fam­i­ly in terms of what they were led to believe could be accomplished.” 

The bill to repeal and replace the death penal­ty has the sup­port of the Utah-based lib­er­tar­i­an think tank Libertas Institute and the American Civil Liberties Union of Utah. McCay also expressed con­cern over the final­i­ty and irre­versibil­i­ty of the death penal­ty, giv­en the large num­bers of peo­ple who have been exon­er­at­ed after wrong­ful con­vic­tions and death sen­tences. DPIC has doc­u­ment­ed at least 185 death-row exon­er­a­tions since 1972, amount­ing to one exon­er­a­tion for every 8.3 peo­ple exe­cut­ed over that time period.

Snow and McCay expressed opti­mism that the Republican-con­trolled leg­is­la­ture will sup­port their bill. ​“The more we can get our col­leagues to crit­i­cal­ly think about the issue, the more peo­ple we have sup­port­ing us on the cause,” McCay said.