PD Editorial: Pulling the plug on death penalty

There’s no questioning Nebraska’s conservative credentials.

Having voted Republican in every presidential election since 1964, it’s as staunchly red as the University of Nebraska’s football jerseys.

And it just became the 18th state to outlaw capital punishment.

The resounding vote in Nebraska’s unique one-house legislature, followed by an override of Gov. Pete Ricketts’ veto, doesn’t signal a seismic shift in the Cornhusker state’s political leanings or show that its lawmakers have turned squishy soft on crime.

Instead, the passionate and principled debate in Lincoln reflects misgivings about the death penalty that span the political spectrum - and the nation.

Public support for capital punishment declined from a peak of 78 percent in 1996 to a four-decade low of 56 percent in a survey conducted this spring, according to Pew Research.

Pew’s latest survey also measured several common concerns about the death penalty: 31 percent of Americans believe that it’s morally wrong, 52 percent think that minorities are more likely than whites to be sentenced to death for similar crimes, 61 percent doubt that it deters crime, and 71 percent say there aren’t adequate safeguards to ensure that an innocent person isn’t executed.

Republicans are more likely to favor capital punishment than Democrats or independents, but some of the anti-death penalty arguments are especially appealing to conservatives.

As one Nebraska senator put it, “I’m pro-life from conception until when God calls somebody home … This is a matter of conscience.”

For others, it’s about money, pragmatism or competence.

Complying with the legal safeguards established by the U.S. Supreme Court isn’t inexpensive. California, for example, has spent more than $4 billion on death-penalty-related costs - trials, automatic state Supreme Court appeals, state and federal habeas corpus proceedings, incarceration - and performed 13 executions since capital punishment was restored in 1978.

Commuting the sentences of Death Row prisoners to life without parole would save the state’s taxpayers $170 million a year, according to a 2011 study by Arthur Alarcon, a federal appeals court judge, and Paula Mitchell, a law professor at Loyola University.

As a practical matter, application of the death penalty is following the same trend line as public support. The number of executions in the United States fell to 35 last year from 98 in 1999 - Nebraska’s last was in 1997 - and the number of death sentences has fallen, too, from 315 in 1996 to 72 last year.

Accompanying those declines, as columnist George Will pointed out on these pages recently, are “dismayingly frequent” reports about botched executions and exonerations of condemned inmates.

Death penalty opponents cited botched executions as Exhibit A in asking the U.S. Supreme Court to declare that lethal injections - the most common method - violate constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

“If any other system in our government was as ineffective and inefficient as is our death penalty, we conservatives would have gotten rid of it a long, long time ago,” Nebraska state Sen. Colby Coash told his colleagues as they debated abolition.

California voters had a chance to repeal the death penalty in 2012, and they said no. There hasn’t been an execution since 2006, and ongoing litigation ensures there won’t be one soon. Meanwhile, the costs keep climbing, including Gov. Jerry Brown’s recent request for money to expand Death Row.

Nebraska legislators, recognizing the high cost and dubious benefits of capital punishment, took a step in the right direction. Given another chance, perhaps California voters would too.