Gov.
Jay Inslee
(D-WA) signed a bill on Thursday removing state laws that the
Washington state
Supreme Court determined are invalid or unconstitutional, effectively abolishing the
death penalty
.
“It’s official. The death penalty is no longer in state law. In 2014 I issued a moratorium. In 2018 the state Supreme Court deemed the death penalty unconstitutional. Now in 2023, passage of SB 5087 strikes it entirely from our statutes,” Inslee
tweeted
.
PENNSYLVANIA GOVERNOR WON’T ENFORCE DEATH PENALTY AND ASKS LEGISLATURE TO ABOLISH IT
Substitute Senate Bill 5087, sponsored by Democratic state Sen. Jamie Pedersen with support from Attorney General Bob Ferguson, abolishes multiple unconstitutional statutes, one of them being the death penalty.
The bipartisan bill passed out of the Washington state Senate in February in a 34-14 vote and passed in the House earlier this month in a 58-39 vote.
Washington state has a long history of attempting to overturn the death penalty, with many of the same supporters attached to the most recent legislation. In 2014, Inslee ordered a statewide moratorium on the death penalty,
citing
that capital punishment is inconsistent and unequal. Three years later, Ferguson introduced
Senate Bill 5354
to end the death penalty by requiring life in prison with the possibility of parole or release as an alternative.
In 2018, the Washington state Supreme Court unanimously voted to end the death penalty. In
State v. Gregory
, Chief Justice Mary Fairhurst wrote it was “now apparent that Washington’s death penalty is administered in an arbitrary and racially biased manner,” declaring the practice unconstitutional.
Sen. Jamie Pedersen said that attempted legislation in the past had been much more forward about removing the death penalty.
This time around, the bill was presented as removing obsolete language from the revised code from the state Supreme Court.
“We had clear discussion in the committee hearings and in the floor debates in both the House and Senate about the fact that it was going to abolish the death penalty,” Pedersen told the Washington Examiner. “But because you couldn’t — because the only thing you could do is take out the repeal of the death penalty, there wasn’t that much to talk about.”
Pedersen acknowledged that while this makes the legislative process easier, few people seem to know the bill overturned the death penalty.
“You couldn’t have all of these creative amendments,” Pedersen said. “And so it ended up being kind of placid, so the good part of that is that it got it done without a whole lot of drama.”
Cal Coburn Brown was the last person executed in Washington. Brown was found guilty of the rape and murder of Holly Washa in 1997. He was one of two people executed by the state in this century, James Homer Elledge being the former, for murdering Eloise Jane Fitzner in 1998. Both were executed through lethal injection.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Twenty-seven states currently still have the death penalty, with
California
,
Oregon
, and
Pennsylvania
having governor-imposed moratoriums pausing the practice, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
“I think for any state where the reason that there is no death penalty is because the Supreme Court has — their Supreme Court has struck down their statute, then I think this could be, this could be a path to getting the death penalty wiped off of the books,” Pedersen said.
While the Washington state Supreme Court revised the code expelling the death penalty, it was still not written into law in the state until now.
“The Washington state Supreme Court ruled that Washington’s death penalty is invalid because it’s applied in an arbitrary and racially biased manner,” Ferguson said in a
statement
. “On Friday, the legislature took the important and appropriate step of repealing the death penalty from our state statutes once and for all. Thank you to Sen. Pedersen for his leadership.”
