Pennsylvania governor temporarily halts all executions
Citing exonerations throughout the country in recent years and concerns that capital punishment is ineffective and expensive, the governor of Pennsylvania said Friday that he is halting all executions until he receives a report from a task force that is now studying the death penalty in the state.
“This decision is based on a flawed system that has been proven to be an endless cycle of court proceedings as well as ineffective, unjust and expensive,” said Gov. Tom Wolf, a newly elected Democrat. He emphasized that the guilty should be punished and said that his sympathy is with crime victims, not perpetrators, reports the Philadelpha Inquirer.
Only three people have been executed in the state since 1978, when the death penalty was reinstated, all at their own request, the newspaper notes. Nonetheless, prosecutor and police organizations criticized the moratorium in strong terms.
Calling the governor’s decision to wait for results of the study “a ploy,” the Pennsylvania District Attorneys Association said Wolf’s suspension of the death penalty is “a misuse of his power and ignores the law. He has rejected the decisions of juries that wrestled with the facts and the law before unanimously imposing the death penalty, disregarded a long line of decisions made by Pennsylvania and federal judges, ignored the will of the legislature, and ultimately turned his back on the silenced victims of cold-blooded killers.”
Others, however, including some relatives of murder victims, supported Wolf’s move.
“I applaud Governor Wolf for recognizing that Pennsylvania’s capital punishment system is broken in so many ways,” said Megan Smith, whose father and stepmother were murdered, in a written statement released by Pennsylvanians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. “It costs far more than imprisoning murderers for life. It is inconsistent and arbitrary and it sometimes sentences innocent people to die.”
The Legal Intelligencer (sub. req.), the Patriot-News and the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette also have stories.
