A U.S. district court judge temporarily blocked South Carolina’s heartbeat abortion ban last week, though the state and other Republican strongholds still have the opportunity to achieve anti-abortion wins this year.
Unfortunately, that’s largely not the case in Democratic strongholds. That doesn’t mean, however, that there are no opportunities for the pro-life cause to win in blue states. There are four states with Democratic trifectas in their state governments (a Democratic governor and a Democratic legislature) that have a chance to protect life this year or next year by abolishing the death penalty.
While the federal government still allows the use of the death penalty, as the Trump administration unfortunately confirmed by executing 13 people, only 28 of the 50 states allow the death penalty as a form of punishment for crimes. Ideally, the number would be zero in both cases.
However, states such as Oregon and California have governors who have put a moratorium on executions, while the death penalty is still legal in Virginia and Nevada. Since Democratic politicians are more likely to oppose capital punishment than Republicans, that means, in theory, the composition of these state governments offers a good chance to eliminate this cruel form of punishment altogether. In doing so, states have a chance to save both lives and money.
Sure, there are a lot of bad people out there who the government executes via the death penalty, but the government kills innocent people with it too, and there’s no way to right that wrong on this Earth. If the state wrongly locks up an innocent man for 20 years, as terrible as that is, at least he can leave prison and receive some form of compensation for the wrongdoing. Meanwhile, if evidence emerges that someone who received the death penalty is innocent, they don’t get their life back.
About 4.1% of death row inmates are innocent, according to a 2014 study from the National Academy of Sciences. That may sound like a small number, but even taking one innocent life is one too many. As of 2019, there were 737 inmates on death row in California. This suggests that about 29 or 30 of them could be innocent.
The financial cost of the death penalty is a real problem as well. While many on the Right may say a bullet is cheap, that’s not the way our system works. People have the right to a trial by jury, and people are innocent until proven guilty. Capital punishment cases use far more public resources than sending someone convicted of committing a heinous act to life in prison. A 2014 study from the University of Seattle found that a death penalty case costs $1.15 million more per case.
And no, the death penalty isn’t some great crime deterrent. Surely, our country needs to do better to prevent crime, including locking convicted rapists and pedophiles up for life, but the government killing people as punishment doesn’t stop others from committing crimes. A 2012 report released by the National Research Council examining more than three decades of data noted that there is “no useful evidence” that the death penalty deters crime.
Abolishing the death penalty might not save as many innocent lives as some pro-life legislation — parental consent laws for abortion for minors, for example — but it’s a component of building a culture that respects life across the country. And that’s something the United States desperately needs.
Tom Joyce (@TomJoyceSports) is a freelance writer who has been published with USA Today, the Boston Globe, Newsday, ESPN, the Detroit Free Press, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Federalist, and a number of other media outlets.
