As he pre­pared for retire­ment, the long-time direc­tor of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) said he does not sup­port the death penal­ty and believes the pun­ish­ment is on its way out in Georgia and across the coun­try. In a tele­vi­sion inter­view on his final day of work as GBI direc­tor, Vernon Keenan (pic­tured) told WXIA-TV, Atlanta’s NBC tele­vi­sion affil­i­ate, that he has ​“nev­er believed in the death penal­ty” and “[t]he day will come when we won’t have the death penal­ty in Georgia and in the United States.”

Keenan, a 45-year vet­er­an of law enforce­ment who has run the state crim­i­nal jus­tice agency for the past six­teen years, called the death penal­ty out­dat­ed and inef­fec­tive in advanc­ing pub­lic safe­ty. Keenan said, ​“I don’t believe the death penal­ty deters any­one. The peo­ple that com­mit crime, they don’t believe they’re going to get caught. The death penal­ty is just a way soci­ety gets ret­ri­bu­tion from the crim­i­nal.” He told WXIA that he believes declin­ing pub­lic sup­port for cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment will ulti­mate­ly lead elect­ed offi­cials to recon­sid­er whether the death penal­ty should remain part of the state’s criminal code.

Keenan’s belief that the death penal­ty is not a deter­rent reflects the wide­ly held beliefs of many senior crim­i­nal jus­tice per­son­nel. A 2008 study found that 88% of the nation’s lead­ing crim­i­nol­o­gists believe the death penal­ty is not an effec­tive deter­rent to crime and that three-quar­ters of them believed that debates over the death penal­ty ​“dis­tract leg­is­la­tures from real crime solu­tions.” A 2008 poll of 500 police chiefs in the United States, com­mis­sioned by DPIC, found that police chiefs rank the death penal­ty low­est among crime fight­ing options as ​“most impor­tant for reduc­ing vio­lent crime.” The chiefs believed that increas­ing the num­ber of police offi­cers, reduc­ing drug abuse, and cre­at­ing a bet­ter econ­o­my were all more impor­tant in reduc­ing crime. More than two-thirds (69%) said that “[p]oliticians sup­port the death penal­ty as a sym­bol­ic way to show they are tough on crime.” ​“I believe life in prison with­out parole is pun­ish­ment enough,” Keenan said. ​“Probably worse than death.”

Georgia was one of only eight states to car­ry out exe­cu­tions in 2018. No Georgia jury has rec­om­mend­ed a new death sen­tence since 2014.

(Doug Richards, Retiring GBI direc­tor pre­dicts demise of death penal­ty, WXIA-TV, 11 Alive News, December 31, 2018.) See New Voices and Deterrence

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