A growing number of Republican state lawmakers are backing efforts to repeal the death penalty, marking a notable shift in conservatives’ views on the matter.
Eight states have had Republican-sponsored bills to repeal the death penalty introduced during their current legislative sessions, according to the group Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty: Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Utah, and Washington state.
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Demetrius Minor, national manager of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, told the Washington Examiner that the Republican lawmakers behind these bills are “making a strong statement about the failures of the death penalty.”
“Their actions continue the trend of GOP state legislators moving away from capital punishment,” Minor said. “They know that the death penalty does not align with their conservative principles of valuing limited government, fiscal conservatism, and life.”
Some of these lawmakers acknowledged a personal shift on the matter.
In Utah, state Rep. V. Lowry Snow and state Sen. Daniel McCay introduced last month a bill to repeal and replace the state’s death penalty with life imprisonment, which advanced out of the Rules Committee this week. McCay recently told Deseret News his thinking changed on the matter after some soul searching, and he believes they can sway more of their GOP colleagues as well.
“The more we can get our colleagues to critically think about the issue, the more people we have supporting us on the cause,” McCay said.
In Ohio, two Republican lawmakers, state Sen. Stephen Huffman and state Rep. Jean Schmidt, recently told the Dayton Daily News they have changed their minds on the issue, calling the death penalty both fiscally irresponsible and incompatible with their “pro-life views.”
The shift among state Republican lawmakers seems to correspond with a shift in voters’ perspectives on the matter as well. According to Gallup surveys, support for the death penalty was at 54% last year, a decline of 26 percentage points from 1994, when the survey recorded its all-time high of 80%. Although the recent surveys still found stark differences on partisan lines, and a majority of Republicans said they support the practice, support among Republicans did drop 5 percentage points in 2021 from the previous year. Gallup also found that those who identified as “conservative” rather than “Republican” were less likely to support capital punishment.
This incremental change among Republicans is playing out at the federal level as well. When Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley and Sen. Dick Durbin introduced a bill to repeal the federal death penalty last year, they had a Republican co-sponsor, Rep. Peter Meijer of Michigan.
In a May press release explaining his support of the bill, Meijer said, “I do not trust the government to never execute an innocent person,” citing the case of Ledell Lee, who was executed in 2017 for the murder of his neighbor, only for DNA testing after his death to call that conviction into question.
Meijer argued that “the death penalty is a poor use of taxpayer dollars; the process of execution is more costly than life without parole.”
“Individuals who commit violent crimes should live out their natural lives with the consequences of their actions,” he said, adding he was proud to co-sponsor the legislation.
The bill has stalled in Congress, although the White House has said President Joe Biden supports it.
But partisan divisions on the matter remain.
The death penalty is currently legal in 27 states, as well as by the federal government and the U.S. military, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Over the last decade, several states have legislatively abolished the practice. But states with or without the death penalty largely correspond to red and blue states.
In some of the states that have recently repealed the practice, Republican lawmakers had some involvement in passing the repeals, with a handful of Republicans in state legislatures in Virginia and Colorado voting in favor of ending the practice. In 2019, the New Hampshire Legislature voted to override Republican Gov. Chris Sununu’s veto of a death penalty repeal, including 40% of the Republican Senate caucus. New Hampshire’s repeal was not retroactive, and one person remains on death row in the Granite State, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
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Nebraska legislatively abolished capital punishment in 2015, with the state legislature overriding a veto by Republican Gov. Pete Ricketts, but voters approved a ballot question reinstating the practice in 2016.
