More Than 250 Conservative Leaders Join Call to End Death Penalty

More than 250 con­ser­v­a­tive lead­ers from across the coun­try have signed on to a state­ment express­ing their oppo­si­tion to cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment as admin­is­tered across the United States and issued a ​“call [to] our fel­low con­ser­v­a­tives to reex­am­ine the death penal­ty and demon­strate the lead­er­ship need­ed to end this failed pol­i­cy.” Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty (CCATDP) released the state­ment in con­junc­tion with an October 28, 2019 nation­al­ly web­cast press con­fer­ence that high­light­ed on-going efforts by con­ser­v­a­tive advo­cates in Ohio, Utah, and Wyoming to abol­ish the death penal­ty in those states. 

The sig­na­to­ries to the state­ment include cur­rent and for­mer state leg­is­la­tors, local‑, county‑, and state-lev­el offi­cers of Republican and Libertarian orga­ni­za­tions, law enforce­ment offi­cials, and oth­er elect­ed offi­cials and can­di­dates. Among the nation­al­ly-rec­og­nized fig­ures on the list are Richard Viguerie, Republican for­mer Governor of Illinois George Ryan, and for­mer U.S. Representative and pres­i­den­tial can­di­date Ron Paul. The state­ment begins, ​“We have come to the con­clu­sion that the death penal­ty does not work and can’t be made to work, not in spite of our con­ser­v­a­tive prin­ci­ples, but because of them.” It sets forth a series of rea­sons why con­ser­v­a­tives have increas­ing­ly turned against cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, call­ing it ​“a cost­ly and inef­fec­tive gov­ern­ment pro­gram” that ​“makes too many mis­takes” and ​“has no place in a cul­ture seek­ing to promote life.” 

The state­ment was intend­ed, in part, as response by con­ser­v­a­tives to the announce­ment by the U.S. fed­er­al gov­ern­ment in July that it will resume exe­cu­tions this December after a 16-year hiatus. 

At the press con­fer­ence, four of the sig­na­to­ries spoke about efforts in Ohio, Utah, and Wyoming to abol­ish the death penal­ty. Ohio Representative Niraj Antani, the first Republican in Ohio to spon­sor a repeal bill, described him­self as pro-life and said his con­ser­v­a­tive val­ues led him to oppose cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. ​“Even the chance of some­one being put to death who could be inno­cent, I believe, for pro-life peo­ple across the coun­try, is enough to oppose the death penal­ty,” he said. 

Wyoming Representative Jared Olsen, who spon­sored a repeal bill ear­li­er this year that passed the state House and failed nar­row­ly in the Senate, also spoke. He said efforts to repeal Wyoming’s death penal­ty were ​“organ­ic,” aris­ing from grass­roots groups across the polit­i­cal spec­trum. He explained that the death penal­ty vio­lates his small gov­ern­ment prin­ci­ples, not­ing that the gov­ern­ment has failed to even deliv­er his mail effec­tive­ly. ​“When some­thing so sim­ple as deliv­er­ing your mail is that inef­fec­tive, it blows my mind that any American would want to trust the jus­tice sys­tem with mat­ters of life and death,” he said. Olsen said he was ​“extreme­ly trou­bled” by the fed­er­al government’s plan to resume exe­cu­tions, a deci­sion that, he said, puts the U.S. in the same ​“cat­e­gories of nations like North Korea.” Kylie Taylor, Wyoming state coor­di­na­tor for CCATDP, joined Olsen in pro­mot­ing Wyoming’s repeal effort, call­ing repeal a mat­ter of ​“guard­ing the indi­vid­ual against gov­ern­ment over­reach” and the risk of exe­cut­ing the innocent. 

Utah CCATDP state direc­tor Darcy Van Orden indi­cat­ed that law­mak­ers intend to intro­duce a bill in the next leg­isla­tive ses­sion to again attempt to abol­ish the state’s death penal­ty. Van Orden described the shift in the Utah cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment debate, jux­ta­pos­ing the 2015 bill that brought back the fir­ing squad as a back-up method of exe­cu­tion and the 2016 repeal bill that passed the Senate and won approval from a House com­mit­tee before run­ning out of time on the House floor. Van Orden expressed con­cern over the num­ber of death-row exon­er­a­tions, the arbi­trari­ness of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment, and the high cost of Utah’s death penal­ty. Citing a study that showed Utah has spent $40 mil­lion on the death penal­ty over the last 20 years, while adding only two peo­ple to death row, she asked: ​“How can Utah waste those funds when we could be pour­ing that mon­ey into help­ing vic­tims?” She expressed opti­mism that changes in the com­po­si­tion of the state leg­is­la­ture, com­bined with edu­ca­tion efforts over the last three years by CCATDP and oth­er repeal advo­cates, could lead to abo­li­tion of the death penal­ty in Utah.