Just before he left office, Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell sent the Legislature a letter, complaining that the state’s death row had become a long-term public housing program.
Either shorten the appeals process or get rid of the death penalty, Rendell said.
We agree. With the latter proposition, that is. It’s time for Pennsylvania to take a meaningless capital punishment option off the books. The state has executed all of three people since it reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Everyone else has won a lesser sentence on appeal, died of natural causes, been exonerated, or just figured out that you can go on endlessly with the grim reaper at the door and a court-appointed lawyer on the case.
Besides, Rendell’s challenge isn’t really an either-or proposition — not as long as federal and state courts continue to recognize that defense attorneys and judges and prosecutors sometimes make mistakes, and that DNA evidence can undo a solid jury verdict.
What Pennsylvania has today is what New Jersey had before its Legislature and governor ditched capital punishment in 2007 — a system that taxes the public cruelly and unusually, raises false hopes for families of victims, and is, without question, inescapably flawed.
The burden of proof on that last issue has been met, most recently by the Pennsylvania Bar Association’s 2007 assessment of the death penalty. Pennsylvania and other states have exonerated convicted “murderers” when new evidence arose or witnesses recanted.
The Death Penalty Information Center notes that states have wasted hundreds of millions of dollars trying to execute — and defending — killers. Is there any other government role on which we spend so much to cover both bets — in an effort that doesn’t seem to satisfy anyone?
We saw a local example of the impact of this expense last year, when Northampton County District Attorney John Morganelli told county council that he had five pending death-penalty cases, each requiring about $10,000 to cover fees for expert witnesses and other costs.
Morganelli, like former prosecutor Rendell, supports the death penalty. But we have to ask: Isn’t it a downer when a prosecutor has a conviction rate of nearly 100 percent and an execution rate of zero? To what end does the state offer the punishment of death, only to have the courts say the state is incapable of carrying it out?
Rendell called for the Legislature to restudy capital punishment, and while the issue has been studied to death, it is a worthy effort. New Jersey lawmakers, when confronted with the evidence they commissioned, bellied up and eliminated the death penalty. Pennsylvania should do the same. The only question is whether Gov. Tom Corbett, a death-penalty supporter, and the Legislature will have the courage to do the right thing. Even if they decide it’s necessitated by budget-cutting in an era of rising public debt, the effect will be the same.
Pennsylvania now has 217 people living on death row. So which is the better course — to find a way to execute the condemned more quickly, no matter the cost, or convert all death sentences to life without parole? (In Pennsylvania, a life sentence is just that; it does not permit parole.)
This isn’t a theoretical question. Not when three convicted killers from the Lehigh Valley remain on death row today, and after two of the more hideous killers in Northampton County history, Martin Appel and Josoph Henry, managed to get their death sentences switched to life on appeals. Diminished lives and real suffering are attached to these crimes and outcomes, in ways most of us can only imagine. And yet, the endless merry-go-round of appeals is a form of punishment to the families of victims, too.
In the end, “life means life” is probably no less or no more of a deterrent to capital crime than the threat of a lethal injection. But it is a more honest way of delivering justice — and far less farcical — than sentencing people to death for the rest of their normal lives.
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