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Editorial: Don’t vote on death penalty

Sat., Nov. 14, 2015

Two recent federal rulings show that the death penalty will not be ruled unconstitutional anytime soon. So it’s up to each state to decide whether executions are just and worth their high cost.

We think not, but the Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys issued a statement Thursday calling for a statewide referendum.

“It was enacted by the people and the people need to decide whether they want it or not,” Lewis County Prosecutor Jonathan Meyer said Friday.

The people already decided, and polls show the death penalty is still popular. But only five people have been executed since 1963, and some of the most heinous murderers have eluded the sentence. Most counties can’t even consider a capital case because the trial and subsequent appeals are too expensive. Most death sentences have been overturned.

Voter reaffirmation won’t end those problems, but it will continue to waste public dollars.

Rather than turn this into a popularity contest, the justice system should face up to the complex problems posed by capital punishment; problems that caused Gov. Jay Inslee to issue a moratorium last year.

Prosecutors are elected officials, so they do feel pressure to pursue capital punishment. But the support obscures some significant realities.

If a referendum were to pass, most county prosecutors would ignore the result and decline to mount capital cases based on costs alone. Whether or not this was a significant factor in the case of serial killer Robert Lee Yates, Spokane County saved a great deal of money in a tight budget by forgoing the death penalty. Pursuing a capital case means scrimping on justice elsewhere.

Then there’s the arbitrary nature of the punishment. Gary Ridgway, the Green River serial killer, isn’t on death row. The last person from Spokane County to be convicted and executed was Woodrow Clark, on Feb. 5, 1946.

If voters reaffirm their support for executions, the money to proceed won’t magically materialize. The punishment would continue to be applied unequally from county to county, with factors such as cost, race and the possibility of executing a wrongfully convicted person still looming.

Recent federal cases underscore ongoing problems. In Oklahoma, the issue was the use of lethal injection after it was revealed that an inmate took 43 minutes to die. In California, it was whether sitting inmates on death row for 30 to 40 years is “cruel and unusual punishment.”

So far, the constitutionality of the death penalty remains intact.

But prosecutors should consider what they’re accomplishing. If the answer is justice, then why is it applied so rarely and unpredictably? It should not be about cost.

It would be better to support recent bills that would abolish the death penalty and replace it with the predictable sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Murderers in aggravated cases would still die in prison, but the myriad problems associated with the death penalty would mercifully come to an end.