If you would like to see the perfect illustration of the divide in America, look at the state of capital punishment by Chris Geidner at Bolts Magazine. It says it all:
When Oregon Governor Kate Brown announced last week that she was commuting the death sentences of everyone on her state’s death row to life in prison without the possibility of parole, it was a landmark moment for the use of clemency in America.
Her decision was the largest gubernatorial act of commuting people’s death sentences since 2003. Seventeen people who began the week under a sentence of death no longer face the prospect of the state killing them.
“It’s certainly unacceptable to me that I would leave office without taking one final action to ensure that none of these individuals will be executed by the state,” Brown told NPR. Brown had, even before this step, established a legacy for her “historic use” of her clemency powers.
Over the years since the U.S. Supreme Court reauthorized the use of capital punishment in 1976 after a brief moratorium, only a handful of governors have taken similarly sweeping steps—most notably, Illinois Governor George Ryan, a Republican who in 2003 commuted the sentences of the 167 people on death row there.
Brown’s mass clemency comes at a time where new death sentences and executions are at low levels nationwide. As the Death Penalty Information Center wrote in its year-end report, released this week, 2022 was the “[e]ighth consecutive year with fewer than 30 executions and 50 new death sentences.” There are 2,400 people on the nation’s death rows today, however, with blue California and red Florida leading the way.
But her actions also highlighted the stark partisan divide on the death penalty today, with two Americas drifting apart in their leaders’ willingness to carry out or block executions.
On the day Brown granted her clemency, Mississippi was preparing for the final execution in the United States this year. The state executed Thomas Loden Jr. on Wednesday, despite ongoing litigation against its lethal injection protocol. In all, 18 people were executed in the country this year, with Texas and Oklahoma carrying out five executions each. Arizona carried out three executions, Missouri and Alabama two each, and the final one in Mississippi.
All six states that carried out executions this year are currently led by Republican governors.
Democratic executives have largely blocked executions. No sitting Democratic governor has overseen one; the last to do so was Virginia’s then-Governor Terry McAuliffe, who oversaw what became the state’s final execution, of William Morva, in 2017. McAuliffe later announced his opposition to the death penalty, and Democrats abolished it in 2021 shortly after taking control of the state government. In 2020, Governor Jared Polis, a Democrat, commuted the sentences of the three people on Colorado’s death row while signing a bill abolishing the death penalty.
With Brown’s latest act of clemency, there are now 24 states that have no one on death row.
That number came close to inching up to 25 on Tuesday. At the urging of Nevada’s Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak, the state’s Board of Pardons was set to consider a motion at its quarterly meeting to commute the death sentences of everyone on Nevada’s death row.
But Carson City Judge Jim Wilson on Monday blocked that item from the meeting’s agenda, ruling that the state had not given enough notice to victims’ families. Sisolak is set to be replaced in January by Republican Joe Lombardo, a sheriff who pledged to “reverse Sisolak’s soft-on-crime policies.”
Sisolak acknowledged during Tuesday’s board meeting that there would be no vote on his proposal. “Placing this matter on the agenda was done as an act of grace, and with the understanding that the death penalty is fundamentally broken,” he said. “The administration of the death penalty is not fair and not equitable and cannot be corrected.”
District attorneys had rushed to ask courts to stop the commutations after Sisolak’s proposal. Wilson, the judge, is himself a former DA in Elko County. Nevada prosecutors have a lot of clout: Last year, state Democrats failed to repeal the death penalty despite running the legislature after a bill derailed in the state Senate, where multiple Democratic leaders have day jobs as prosecutors in Clark County, where the DA’s office is prone to seeking death sentences. Sisolak’s comments at the time also helped stall the bill.
“The fact that prosecutors in Nevada once again took steps to ensure the government is able to execute people is of little surprise since they continue to use the threat of execution as a means of coercion in criminal prosecutions,” Athar Haseebullah, the executive director of the ACLU of Nevada, told Bolts.
“I am glad the governor made this most recent push for commutations, but the last four years provided Nevada leaders, including the vaunted Democratic trifecta, multiple opportunities to address this issue and we walk away on this issue four years later in the same predicament we were in four years ago,” Haseebullahhe added.
The partisan divide is similarly complex in other states.
Read the whole thing to get the full flavor of the bloodthirsty nature of the capital punishment adherents. And pour yourself a drink before you read about all the botched executions that have been taking place over the past few years. You’re going to need it.
This is one of those issues that makes you just want to shut your mind off after a while. But you can’t. The majority of nations, including all of Europe, have abolished capital punishment but China, India, the United States, Singapore, Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Japan, and Taiwan are still carrying them out. Even Russia has had a moratorium on capital punishment and hasn’t handed down a death sentence or carried out an execution since 1996.
The most death sentences are handed down by China, Iraq, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and … the United States. It is unconscionable.
Good for Kate Brown. And more power to those who are fighting the good fight on this issue.
Anyway … happy holidays, I guess???