On Thursday, lawmakers in New Hampshire’s Republican-majority legislature tried to find the two-thirds majority they needed to override a Republican Gov. Chris Sununu’s veto of their bill abolishing the state’s death penalty law. Although the attempt failed, and the state will keep the death penalty on the books, it should not be surprising that conservatives increasingly want to take that ultimate power of life and death away from the government.
For one thing, the death penalty costs a lot more than keeping an inmate in prison. A 2014 audit from Nevada found that the death penalty cost the state, on average, between $1.03 million to $1.31 million per case, while non-death penalty cases, where life without parole is sought, cost $775,000 in total.
Today, those costs have risen, as indicated from recent studies in Oregon and Washington and states, such as Nevada, have seen bills that cite cost as a reason to oppose executions. For conservatives, rightly wary of government spending, deficits and waste of tax payer dollars, on economic grounds, the death penalty is hard to defend.
Perhaps more fundamentally, however, another guiding star of conservatism is limited government and opposition to giving political leaders more power than they need. With the death penalty, which is clearly not needed to keep dangerous individuals off the streets in the modern world, granting the state authority over life and death is hardly justifiable.
Finally, there are a number of other reasons to oppose the death penalty, including the inability to later go back and reassess evidence (you can let someone out of prison but you can’t bring them back after killing them), the recent problems states have faced with botched executions and a host of moral reasons to support life over state sponsored killing.
In short, although the override of the governor’s veto in New Hampshire was unsuccessful, it should not be surprising that more conservatives now oppose the death penalty. Many of them came together to abolish Nebraska’s death penalty in 2015, although the voters later overturned them in a referendum. The field is moving on this issue, and hopefully others will join the fight to abolish the practice.
