Fewer executions ref lect anti-death penalty trend
OUR VIEWS | OKLAHOMA INMATE FACES NEEDLE THIS WEEK
T won’t happen in this state any time soon, but we are reaching a point where, sooner or later, it is going to end.” The speaker represents Amnesty International. The topic is the use of the death penalty in Texas, although he could just as easily have been referencing Oklahoma or any of the other states where the death penalty remains on the books.
It’s one new year’s prediction that seems sure to come true, in time, although Oklahoma and Texas likely will be among the last to give it up, in part because its use is not anathema to those who live in our states. Residents realize that prosecutors seek the death penalty only when they believe the case warrants it, that the burden of proof is high, and that the appeals process is exhaustive.
This week Gary Welch, 49, is scheduled to be executed at the state prison in Mcalester. Welch was convicted of killing another man in Ottawa County in 1994. Welch says he acted in self-defense, and told the state Pardon and Parole Board last month that information provided by the attorney general’s office was “a whole lot of lies, deceit and twisting of facts.” The victim’s family was being vindictive, he said.
The AG’S office says Welch beat and stabbed his victim to death to send a message over a drug deal that went wrong. Only a few hours earlier, Welch had pulled a knife on another person and demanded drugs. The death sentence was upheld last year by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, and in October the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his appeal.
So 18 years after the killing, Welch will go to the death chamber this week. There may be others who meet the same fate in Oklahoma in 2012, but not many. A backlog of death penalty cases produced a high volume of executions for several years after the state resumed executions in 1990, but that backlog has eased. In 2011, just two inmates were executed in Oklahoma.
Nationally, juries are proving more reluctant to use the death penalty in capital cases. The Death Penalty Information Center says fewer than 100 people were sentenced to death in the United States last year — the first time that’s happened in 35 years. The option of life in prison without parole is proving more palatable.
This reflects an ongoing shift in attitudes about the death penalty, driven in part by cases in which inmates have been exonerated by DNA testing. Although more than 30 states have the death penalty, far fewer than that actually use it — eight states put inmates to death last year. Illinois last year took the punishment off its books, with Gov. Pat Quinn saying it was “seriously broken.”
Oklahoma has had some high-profile DNA cases, most notably that of Ronald Williamson, who in 1999, after 12 years in prison and less than a week away from lethal injection, was exonerated in the killing of an Ada woman.
That case hasn’t dissuaded other Oklahoma juries from recommending the death penalty. They will use it as long as it’s available, however long that is.