In a unanimous decision Thursday, the Washington state Supreme Court ruled the state’s death penalty unconstitutional because it “is administered in an arbitrary and racially biased manner” in the words of Chief Justice Mary Fairhurst, who wrote the court’s opinion. The eight inmates on death row in Washington will have their sentences converted to life imprisonment. The decision adds the Evergreen State to the roster of 19 other states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico that have no capital punishment.
Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee, who imposed a moratorium on the death penalty in 2014 on the same grounds as the court ruled, said of the decision:
“Today’s decision by the state Supreme Court thankfully ends the death penalty in Washington. The court makes it perfectly clear that capital punishment in our state has been imposed in an ‘arbitrary and racially biased manner,’ is ‘unequally applied’ and serves no criminal justice goal. This is a hugely important moment in our pursuit for equal and fair application of justice.”
The case involved Allen Eugene Gregory. He was convicted of aggravated first degree murder and sentenced to death in 2001. As part of his appeal, Gregory’s lawyers commissioned a study on the effect of race and county on sentences of death in Washington. It found variances county by county and discovered that African Americans were four-and-a-half times more likely to be sentenced to death as white defendants convicted of similar crimes under similar circumstances.
The Washington ruling is welcome, indeed. But, even though the numbers of U.S. executions have fallen sharply in the past two decades, the racist, classist death penalty remains on the books in 30 states and under federal law.
Eighteenth century pickpockets used to prowl the swarms of Englishfolk who turned out for public executions of ... pickpockets. As spectacle, the gallows gave street vendors and street thieves a lucrative venue with which to earn their bread. As retribution, capital punishment works. As deterrent, the noose, the chopping block, the firing squad and all other manners of execution have never been effective. The death penalty is a Dark Ages relic reflecting an unwillingness to overcome the instincts of our reptile brains with civilized behavior the way almost all the other developed democracies on the planet have seen fit to do.
One state where the death penalty has been much used is Texas, which has executed 555 people since 1976, including 10 so far this year. Anybody who has followed that state's dismal record of sleeping defense lawyers, evidence-withholding prosecutors, incompetent testing laboratories and expert witnesses who aren't very expert have always suspected that the state snuffed a few innocents.
But, as the Chicago Tribune proved more than decade ago, Texas isn't the only state where innocents almost certainly were executed on account of racial discrimination, fabricated and coerced confessions, false testimony of jailhouse snitches, forensics screw-ups and incompetent lawyering. The newspaper uncovered scores of cases of people who wound up on death row for crimes they didn't commit. The governor subsequently ordered a moratorium on carrying out the death penalty, and many convicts awaiting the executioner were exonerated. One of those, Anthony Porter, was within 48 hours of being killed, having already been fitted for his burial suit and having ordered his final meal. Subsequently, in 2011, the Illinois legislature abolished its death penalty.
If every state had dumped the death penalty, some innocents would be walking around today instead of having been officially killed. We'll never know for sure how many. All we do know is that new evidence—much of it DNA-based—continues to reveal that people not just in Illinois but several other states have been convicted of capital crimes they did not commit and have been exonerated, sometimes after decades of death row. And we know that some are dead who would have been exonerated if prosecutors had not engaged in misconduct or had not relied on incompetent "experts," poor lab techniques, old forensics methodology, or outright racism.
But while everyone objects to innocents being executed, policies in place—poorly paid overworked public defenders being one of the main failures—ensure that some people will be convicted and some of them executed for crimes they did not commit.
It is, however, easy to fight for the innocent. Too few people are willing to stand up to say the guilty should also not be executed. Someday, the sooner the better, the rest of the states will follow what Washington and Illinois and six other states have done since 2007 and opt out of barbarism to abolish this deplorable evil.