Shore up Pa.’s death penalty and start executing people
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court made the right call recently when it upheld the constitutionality of the death penalty.
The justices shouldn’t be dictating policy.
That’s the Legislature’s job.
The court should review death-row appeals case by case but otherwise needs to stay in its lane. It already crossed the line last year when it redrew the state’s congressional districts.
Now it’s time for the Legislature to do its job. That means clearing the way for executions to resume by ensuring capital cases are heard fairly.
Gov. Tom Wolf halted executions shortly after he took office in 2015, citing flaws and unfairness in the system. He said he would await the findings of a pending investigation by the Joint State Government Commission.
The commission’s task force issued its report in June 2018.
It didn’t offer an opinion on whether the death penalty should be used but raised questions including whether it is applied equitably across race and geography; if there are safeguards to assure that intellectually disabled people aren’t sentenced to death; if there are adequate procedures to identify errors; and if there is adequate defense counsel. Those are some significant concerns. Yet more than a year later, the Legislature hasn’t implemented any of the task force’s recommendations.
The task force suggested creating a state-funded capital defender’s office to handle all death penalty trials and appeals statewide. That would save counties money and improve representation.
The task force suggested creating a “guilty but mentally ill” classification for defendants who would be treated the same as “legally insane” and not face capital punishment. It suggested determining a defendant’s intellectual disabilities before trial instead of afterward, so the death penalty wouldn’t be pursued inappropriately, reducing the length of trials and saving money.
The task force suggested data should be collected to make sure capital punishment is applied consistently to the same types of crimes and without regard for the defendant’s or victim’s race.
If Pennsylvania is going to have a death penalty — and it should — then it should use it. And to use it fairly, changes must be made.
Wolf’s moratorium isn’t an excuse to do nothing.
His time as governor is running out. A new governor will be elected in three years. If he or she flips the switch on executions again — and I hope that happens — the system needs to be ready to go.
Not every murderer should be put to death. But some should, if there is an airtight case.
That means they were caught on video killing people. Or there were eyewitnesses with corroborating physical evidence. A confession would be icing on the cake.
I’ll use the example I’ve used before, the slaying of Philadelphia police Officer Robert Wilson III in 2015. He was gunned down during a robbery at a GameStop store, where he had stopped to do a security check and buy his son a birthday present.
The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the evidence in the case included video, with Wilson’s final moments captured in extraordinary clarity by the store’s cameras.
It’s hard to argue innocence under such circumstances. Wilson was killed just because he was a cop. His killers should have paid the ultimate price.
But prosecutors offered a plea deal, despite objections by some of Wilson’s relatives and the police union. So his killers, brothers Carlton Hipps, 32, and Ramone Williams, 28, will spend the rest of their days behind bars.
Even if they had been sentenced to die, it’s unlikely their sentence would have been carried out. Only three people have been executed in Pennsylvania since that penalty was reinstated in 1978. The last execution was in 1999, well before Wolf ’s moratorium.
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court considered last month whether to outlaw the death penalty amid arguments that it’s used cruelly and arbitrarily on poor and black defendants.
The issue was brought before the justices through petitions by death row inmates Jermont Cox of Philadelphia and Kevin Marinelli of Northumberland County. They were sentenced to death in the 1990s after being convicted of murder.
Cox’s petition extensively cited the report from the Joint State Government Commission.
“The commonwealth’s attempts to apply the death penalty in a fair and reliable manner have failed,” it contends.
Federal defender Timothy Kane testified at a hearing on Sept. 11 that more than half of the 441 death sentences imposed since that penalty was reinstated in the late 1970s were ruled to be flawed and were thrown out.
The state attorney general’s office defended the death penalty, and the Supreme Court rejected the petitions without explanation on Sept. 26.
That doesn’t mean the status quo is acceptable. The death penalty will continue to be challenged. State officials must address the weaknesses so it will stand up to those challenges and can be used with confidence.