Bill to Abolish Wyoming’s Death Penalty Introduced with Bipartisan Support

A bipartisan coalition of Wyoming legislators has introduced a bill to abolish the state’s death penalty. On January 15, 2019, Cheyenne Republican State Representative Jared Olsen (pictured, left) and Republican State Senator Brian Boner (pictured, right), introduced HB145, which would repeal the death penalty and replace it with a judicially imposed sentence of life without parole or life imprisonment. The bill, co-sponsored by sixteen other representatives and senators, has the backing of several legislative leaders, including Speaker of the House Steve Harshman, R-Casper, and Senate Minority Leader Chris Rothfuss, D-Laramie. “You’ve got social conservatives and libertarians and that’s a little more of a mix than we’ve had before,” Olsen said. “And then if you look at the heavy hitters on the bill, we’ve got three-quarters of the House leadership on the bill.”

A coalition of outside organizations that includes he League of Women Voters of Wyoming, the Catholic Diocese of Cheyenne, and the ACLU of Wyoming also are supporting the repeal effort. The groups released a statement on January 16 calling the death penalty “a costly and unfair practice that does not enhance public safety or promote justice in Wyoming.” The breadth of the support distinguishes this year’s effort to abolish capital punishment from prior efforts over the past five years, according to Rep. Olsen. “The momentum and desire behind all those groups is just flourishing right now,” he said. “They’re coming to me every day, working different legislators and reporting back to me on what they’re doing. I think there’s a lot of outreach in the community as well. There’s a lot of momentum.”

Proponents of the bill say that Wyoming’s death penalty is impractical and costs too much. The state has only carried out one execution since 1976, and does not currently have any prisoners facing an active death sentence. (The death sentence imposed on Dale Wayne Eaton, who had been the state’s only death-row prisoner, was overturned in 2014, and federal appeals relating to that grant of relief are still pending.) Despite the rarity of the death penalty in Wyoming, the fiscal note that accompanies the abolition bill estimates it would cost the state $750,000 to maintain capital punishment in 2020. “We continue to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to maintain the death penalty,” Sen. Boner said. “I believe the availability of a life without parole sentence adequately balances the need to protect public safety while recognizing the need to reduce the strain on taxpayer resources.”

The Casper Star-Tribune editorialized in 2013 that life without parole was a better option than the death penalty for many family members of murder victims. The current abolition efforts have also gained the editorial support of the Powell Tribune, which wrote on January 22 that “[i]t seems that, for all practical purposes, the death penalty has already been abolished in Wyoming.” Noting that “like anything else that involves people, [the Wyoming legal system] will sometimes get it wrong,” the paper said that when someone is wrongfully executed, “that mistake is irreversible. And it’s a risk that’s not worth taking.”

(Katie Kull, Legislators push death penalty repeal in Wyoming, Wyoming Tribune Eagle, January 20, 2019; Nick Reynolds, Will the Wyoming legislature repeal the death penalty this year?, Casper Star Tribune, January 17, 2019; Bob Beck, Wyoming Legislators Hope To Repeal State’s Death Penalty, January 16, 2019; CJ Baker, Editorial: Time to kill the death penalty, Powell Tribune, January 22, 2019.) See New Voices, Recent Legislative Activity, and Editorials.