Retired District Judge Steven Becker, along with pros­e­cu­tors, defense lawyers, and reli­gious lead­ers, recent­ly tes­ti­fied at a leg­isla­tive hear­ing in Kansas in favor of a bill to repeal the death penal­ty. Judge Becker com­ment­ed, ​“As long as the death penal­ty is a part of our imper­fect sys­tem, there will always be the unac­cept­able pos­si­bil­i­ty of the exe­cu­tion of an inno­cent per­son.” Ron Wurtz, a fed­er­al pub­lic defend­er and a for­mer direc­tor of the state’s Death Penalty Defense Unit, high­light­ed the ongo­ing risks of exe­cut­ing inno­cent defen­dants: ​“The American peo­ple have seen the ongo­ing releas­es from death row. About one release for wrong­ful con­vic­tion for every nine exe­cu­tions.” Other groups voic­ing their con­cerns with the state’s death penal­ty were the Kansas Catholic Conference, the Central States Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and the League of Women Voters. Testimony indi­cat­ed the death penal­ty impos­es a sig­nif­i­cant finan­cial bur­den on the state: the cost of pros­e­cu­tion and appel­late action on a sin­gle death penal­ty case was esti­mat­ed at $1.2 mil­lion, while the incar­cer­a­tion of some­one sen­tenced to life in prison was placed at $740,000.

(T. Carpenter, ​“House pan­el explores views on death penal­ty,” Kansas Capital-Journal, March 15, 2012). See New Voices and Recent Legislative Activity.

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