Lawmakers Urged To Change Execution Method

Changing the state’s preferred method of execution from hanging to lethal injection would save taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars, Attorney General Christine Gregoire testified Thursday.

Gregoire told members of a Senate committee that her agency has spent $320,000 since 1991 in a “constant, costly, time-consuming defense of hanging.”

The most recent case involves Mitchell Rupe, a convicted killer whose life was spared last year in part because a court ruled he was too heavy to be hanged.

“Mitch Rupe is just the latest - and I am sure by no means the last - death row inmate to use our law to his advantage,” Gregoire said. “Retaining hanging as the primary method impedes us from carrying out the law of this state.”

Washington law specifies that condemned inmates be executed by hanging unless they choose lethal injection. If they fail to choose a method, they are hanged.

But the attorney general has been forced to defend hanging in recent years as prisoners and other groups challenged the method as cruel and unusual punishment. Just fighting Rupe’s appeals has cost the state $150,000 since last year, Gregoire said.