Wyoming

The Wyoming state sen­ate has defeat­ed a bill to repeal the state’s death penal­ty. Senate File 150, spon­sored by Senator Brian Boner (R – Douglas, pic­tured dur­ing the floor debate), was report­ed out of the Senate Revenue Committee by a 4 – 1 vote on March 4, the sec­ond time a bill to end Wyoming’s death penal­ty had passed a state sen­ate com­mit­tee. However, the bill failed in the state sen­ate by a vote of 19 – 11. Nine Republicans and the chamber’s two Democrats sup­port­ed the measure.

A Wyoming state sen­ate com­mit­tee has advanced to the full Senate a bill to repeal the state’s death penalty.

A Wyoming woman whose moth­er and hus­band were mur­dered in sep­a­rate inci­dents is call­ing on the state to repeal its death penal­ty for the ben­e­fit of vic­tims’ fam­i­ly members.

Legislators in an August 13, 2020 vir­tu­al forum on cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment say that the eco­nom­ic impact of the coro­n­avirus on state bud­gets adds to their con­cerns about the via­bil­i­ty and desir­abil­i­ty of the death penal­ty as a social policy.

Calling cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment a ​“lux­u­ry” that the state can no longer afford, Wyoming Governor Mark Gordon (pic­tured) told leg­is­la­tors that he is ​“very seri­ous­ly” con­sid­er­ing impos­ing a mora­to­ri­um on the state’s rarely-used death penalty.

In a year of declin­ing death-penal­ty usage across the United States, nowhere was the ero­sion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment as sus­tained and pro­nounced in 2019 as it was in the west­ern United States. Continuing a wave of momen­tum from Washington​’s judi­cial abo­li­tion of cap­i­tal pun­ish­ment in October 2018, one state halt­ed exe­cu­tions and dis­man­tled its death cham­ber, anoth­er cleared its death row, two cut back on the cir­cum­stances in which the death penal­ty could be sought and imposed, and the entire region set record lows for new death sen­tences and executions.

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…

NEWS: July 23—The U.S. Court of Appeals has ruled that Wyoming pros­e­cu­tors may seek the death penal­ty in resen­tenc­ing pro­ceed­ings against 74-year-old Dale Wayne Eaton. Eaton had been the only per­son on Wyoming’s death row between 2004, when he was sen­tenced to death for a 1988 killing, and 2014, when a fed­er­al dis­trict court reversed his death sen­tence for inef­fec­tive penal­ty-phase rep­re­sen­ta­tion. At that time, Eaton sought to bar a cap­i­tal resen­tenc­ing tri­al, argu­ing that the death of poten­tial mit­i­ga­tion wit­ness­es and the loss of mit­i­gat­ing evi­dence caused by the…

Bills to repeal and replace the death penal­ty with non-cap­i­tal pun­ish­ments have gained new trac­tion across the United States in 2019 as a result of oppo­si­tion to the death penal­ty among ide­o­log­i­cal­ly con­ser­v­a­tive leg­is­la­tors. That move­ment – buoyed by fis­cal and pro-life con­ser­v­a­tives, con­ser­v­a­tive law-reform advo­cates, and the deep­en­ing involve­ment of the Catholic Church in death-penal­ty abo­li­tion – has led to unprece­dent­ed suc­cess­es in numer­ous hous­es of state leg­is­la­tures and moved repeal efforts clos­er to fruition in a num­ber of deeply Republican states. In 2019, con­ser­v­a­tive leg­is­la­tors are lead­ing the…

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.…