A bipar­ti­san bill to abol­ish the death penal­ty in Washington passed the state Senate on February 14 on a 26 – 22 vote. SB 6052 now moves to the House of Representatives, where the chair­woman of the House Judiciary Committee has said it will be giv­en a hear­ing. ​“Today, the Washington State Senate took an his­toric, bipar­ti­san vote, pass­ing Attorney General-request­ed leg­is­la­tion to elim­i­nate the death penal­ty and replace it with life in prison with­out pos­si­bil­i­ty of parole,” said incum­bent Democratic Attorney General Bob Ferguson. He, his Republican pre­de­ces­sor Rob McKenna, and Governor Jay Inslee had asked the leg­is­la­ture to take up the mea­sure. The bill also received sup­port from Republican King County pros­e­cu­tor Dan Satterberg, and five Republican sen­a­tors vot­ed for its pas­sage. During an emo­tion­al debate on the floor of the sen­ate, Sen. Mark Miloscia (R — Federal Way) told law­mak­ers, ​“all peo­ple deserve to live.” Miloscia, who is one of the bil­l’s co-spon­sors, said, ​“I’m here to ask for mer­cy, lit­er­al­ly for the worst among us.” Sen. Maureen Walsh (R — Walla Walla), anoth­er spon­sor of the bill, said ​“We spend a lot of mon­ey, our tax mon­ey, appeal­ing these deci­sions, and we have done this for many, many years. I have no sym­pa­thy for peo­ple that kill peo­ple, that’s not why I’m doing this. I’m doing this maybe because I feel like it’s some­what our respon­si­bil­i­ty as leg­is­la­tors to vet these issues here in this forum, in this venue.” A third co-spon­sor, Sen. Reuven Carlyle (D — Seattle), raised ongo­ing con­cerns about the risk of exe­cut­ing inno­cent defen­dants. ​“You can­not read a front page sto­ry about DNA mis­takes that has some­one in jail for 35 years and not be jolt­ed to the core,” he said. ​“That has trans­formed the pub­lic’s view of this issue.” Governor Inslee, who imposed a mora­to­ri­um on exe­cu­tions in 2014, described the vote as reflect­ing ​“an increas­ing recog­ni­tion of the pub­lic that this is not an effec­tive and cer­tain­ly an unequal admin­is­tra­tion of jus­tice and is no longer accept­able in the state of Washington.” ​“I hope Washington joins the grow­ing num­ber of states that are choos­ing to end the death penal­ty,” he said. Before the final vote, Senators vot­ed down two amend­ments that would have nar­rowed the death penal­ty, but not elim­i­nat­ed it, and a third amend­ment that would have put the issue to vot­ers in a pub­lic ini­tia­tive. Ferguson called on the House to join the Senate in pass­ing the mea­sure. The bill, he said, pro­vid­ed the House ​“the oppor­tu­ni­ty to abol­ish our bro­ken death penalty.”

(Joel Connelly, Connelly: State Senate votes to abol­ish death penal­ty, SeattlePI, February 14, 2018; Max Wasserman, Abolition of death penal­ty gets clos­er to real­i­ty as bill clears Washington state Senate, The News Tribune, February 14, 2018; Rachel La Corte, Washington Senate pass­es bill to abol­ish death penal­ty, Associated Press, February 14, 2018.) See Recent Legislative Activity.

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