Oregon Closes Death Row, Joins National Trend Away from Automatic Solitary Confinement

The Oregon Department of Corrections (DOC) has announced that it will close the state’s death row and inte­grate most of its cap­i­tal­ly sen­tenced pris­on­ers into the gen­er­al prison pop­u­la­tion. The move reflects the con­tin­u­ing decline of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in Oregon and fol­lows a nation­wide trend of remov­ing death-row pris­on­ers from auto­mat­ic solitary confinement. 

In an announce­ment on May 15, 2020, DOC Director Colette Peters said the move would reduce costs and added, ​“This real­ly is an oper­a­tional deci­sion, in line with some of the human­i­ty and nor­mal­cy work that we’ve been doing, as we look at reduc­ing the use of seg­re­ga­tion.” Oregon’s deci­sion is in line with recent actions tak­en in sev­er­al oth­er death-penal­ty states to end auto­mat­ic soli­tary con­fine­ment for death-sen­tenced pris­on­ers and grant them access to some of the same pro­grams avail­able to oth­er pris­on­ers, includ­ing edu­ca­tion­al and occupational programs. 

Oregon has added only one pris­on­er to its death row since June 2014 and has had a mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions since 2011. In 2019, the state sig­nif­i­cant­ly lim­it­ed the crimes for which cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment can be imposed, reduc­ing the cat­e­gories of mur­der pun­ish­able by death from 19 to four. The new law restricts the death penal­ty to cas­es involv­ing acts of ter­ror­ism in which two or more peo­ple are killed, pre­med­i­tat­ed mur­ders of chil­dren aged thir­teen or younger, prison mur­ders com­mit­ted by those already incar­cer­at­ed for aggra­vat­ed mur­der, and pre­med­i­tat­ed mur­ders of police or cor­rec­tion­al offi­cers. The state cur­rent­ly has 29 death-row pris­on­ers, 27 of whom are housed on death row at the Oregon State Penitentiary (pic­tured). One woman and one pris­on­er with med­ical needs are housed separately.

Peters said the state’s cur­rent death-row unit, which has a capac­i­ty of 40 pris­on­ers, will be con­vert­ed to a dis­ci­pli­nary unit. The unit, she said, can be used more effi­cient­ly and cost effec­tive­ly after the move.

A 2016 report by the Vera Institute of Justice, a research and pol­i­cy non­prof­it, rec­om­mend­ed that Oregon close its death row. Elena Vanko, a senior pro­gram asso­ciate at the insti­tute, and Cassandra Stubbs, direc­tor of the ACLU Capital Punishment Project, described the clo­sure as part of a nation­al trend. Vanko said that pris­on­ers should be assigned to dif­fer­ent secu­ri­ty lev­els based on an assess­ment of their con­duct in prison, rather than auto­mat­ic place­ment based upon their sen­tences. Death row pris­on­ers have had ​“far few­er” dis­ci­pli­nary issues com­pared with the rest of the prison pop­u­la­tion, Peters said, and experts say that, as a group, those who have been sen­tenced to death pose no more of a dan­ger when housed in gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion than do oth­er pris­on­ers who have been con­vict­ed of murder.

Portland crim­i­nal defense lawyer Jesse Merrithew, who rep­re­sents two of Oregon’s death-row pris­on­ers, saw the change as an indi­ca­tion that the state is con­tin­u­ing its shift away from cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment. ​“We don’t actu­al­ly impose the death penal­ty and now we are appar­ent­ly going to not even house peo­ple who have a death sen­tence sep­a­rate­ly from the rest of the pop­u­la­tion,” he said. ​“You got­ta ask: What is the point? Why do we still have it at all?”

Oregon is the sixth state in the last year to sig­nif­i­cant­ly change the con­di­tions of incar­cer­a­tion for death-row pris­on­ers, but only the sec­ond to do so with­out a law­suit or the threat of legal action. Virginia, South Carolina, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania have all end­ed auto­mat­ic soli­tary con­fine­ment for death-row pris­on­ers. Prisoners in those states have gained access to pro­grams and rights pre­vi­ous­ly reserved for gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion pris­on­ers, includ­ing edu­ca­tion­al and occu­pa­tion­al pro­grams, group reli­gious ser­vices, and con­tact vis­its with fam­i­ly mem­bers. California announced the cre­ation of a pilot pro­gram in February 2020 to allow some of the state’s death-sen­tenced pris­on­ers to move from San Quentin’s death row to gen­er­al pop­u­la­tion in oth­er max­i­mum secu­ri­ty pris­ons that offer work and oth­er rehabilitative programs.