Best not to get too excited, but there’s a fairly strong possibility that several more states may, in the not too distant future, join the 19 that have already abolished the death penalty. Amber Phillips writes:
So far this legislative session, GOP state lawmakers in 10 states -- an unprecedented number -- sponsored or co-sponsored legislation to repeal the death penalty, including in perhaps the reddest state in the nation, Utah. None of them passed, but some got further than even their supporters expected. In Utah, a repeal bill passed the state Senate and a House committee. For the first time in decades, Missouri's full state Senate debated the issue. A Kentucky legislative committee held a hearing on repealing the death penalty for the first time since the state reinstated capital punishment in 1976 (even though it failed 9 to 8).
There's more evidence outside legislative circles. This fall, the National Association of Evangelicals changed its 40-year position of exclusive support for the death penalty to make room for evangelical Christians to do the same. And in Georgia, anti-death-penalty advocates point out that last year no jury there handed out a death sentence for crimes that were eligible for it.
One of the people Phillips interviewed, former Kansas College Republicans president Dalton Glasscock, posits the idea that there is a generational gap in the GOP over the death penalty, which led to the group’s putting an anti-death penalty plank in its platform last summer. That may be so, but the Pew Research Center has found that gap to be small. Some 51 percent of people under age 30 favor the death penalty, as do 57 percent of those 30 to 49, 61 percent of those 50 to 64, and 54 percent of those 65 and older.
The real gap is partisan. As Pew’s most recent chart on the subject shows, there is a 37 percent gap between Democrats and Republicans who support the death penalty. Over the past four years, Pew found that Republicans favoring capital punishment fell by just 2 percent, from 79 percent to 77 percent in favor. Among Democrats in the same period, those favoring the death penalty fell from 49 percent to 40 percent, a 9 percent drop.
The question is whether Republicans who oppose the death penalty can persuade enough of their fellow party members to join them in that opposition and how soon they might be able to do so. Phillips notes that all three main arguments GOP opponents are using are very much what other anti-death penalty advocates have been making for decades. But with a conservative twist: The death penalty is not moral (and conservatives say it’s not consistent with “pro-life” beliefs); it’s not fiscally sound (and not consistent with belief in small government); and life in prison without parole serves the same purpose as the death penalty in getting murderers off the street for good.
While it’s encouraging to see this opposition from the right, anti-death penalty activists—whatever their other political views—are well aware that the need for their efforts will not be vanishing anytime soon.