TO CLOSE

Governor Jay Inslee welcomed the decision of the Supreme Court of Washington State to end the death penalty. Washington becomes the 20th state to end the death penalty. (October 11)
AP

The execution chamber of Washington State Penitentiary, illustrated with a 2008 photo, will no longer be used after the state Supreme Court has banned the death penalty.(Photo: AP Photo / Ted S. Warren)

Apparently, the Washington State Supreme Court's decision on Thursday to declare the death penalty unconstitutional could only affect those in the northwestern corner of the country.

After all, as the 20th state to ban or suspend the death penalty, Washington remains in the minority. And the state's highest court did not declare the death penalty illegal per se, but rather the manner in which it was applied, claiming that it is "arbitrarily imposed and based on racism".

However, lawyers see it as the last step towards the continued abolition of the penalty, his death knell, so to speak, and believe that Washington's decision to commute death sentences to life in prison will become more the rule than the exception in the United States. States.

"This is part of a very clear trend of the past 10 years to abolish the death penalty, whether through their legislature, as in New Jersey, or their courts, as in Washington, New York and some other states, "said Ellen Kreitzberg, a law professor at Santa Clara University, who has written extensively on capital punishment.

Since the lifting of a national moratorium on the death penalty in 1976, the number of executions in the United States peaked at 98 in 1999, but has declined at a relatively constant rate since then. standing at 23 in 2017 and 18 this year, according to the report on the death penalty. Center.

Since 2007, 11 states have banned or suspended the death penalty. Nebraska, which abolished the practice in 2015, is the only state of this period to recover it, and restores it through a voting initiative the following year.

Some of the states that have maintained punishment in place hardly use it. New Hampshire, for example, is the only state in the north-east that still allows the death penalty, but it has not been executed since 1976. Iowa either. Wyoming got one.

More: Deferred execution for the inmate who requested death by electric wheelchair

Kreitzberg said states like Colorado, Oregon and Pennsylvania, which apply a moratorium but do not provide for an outright ban – as was the case with Washington – are likely to do the same and banish this. convenient. It's already banned in the Upper Midwest.

On the other hand, all southern states retain the prerogative to execute prisoners and do so much more often than the rest of the country. When Texas and Oklahoma are included in the region, the South has carried out 1,211 executions out of 1,483 recorded nationally since 1976.

Even removing these two states – Texas is the undisputed leader with 555 states – South made 544 executions.

Franklin Wilson, an associate professor of criminology at Indiana State University, said the customs and mores of the people, which may include religious beliefs, dictate the direction that states must take on this subject.

"I think it depends on the culture of the general public regarding their attitude to punishment," Wilson said.

Wilson, who has taught in Texas, Tennessee, Kentucky and Missouri before taking up his current position in Indiana, also notes that general academic scores generally affect attitudes at school. regard to the death penalty.

According to a survey conducted by the 2015 American Community Survey, 14 of the 20 states with the highest percentage of college graduates have abolished or suspended this practice.

"Although research has shown that the level of individual education has minimal or no impact on support for the death penalty, overall state education levels may be more telling." , did he declare. "There seems to be at least a superficial correlation between a state's overall level of education and whether or not the state retains the death penalty."

Related: Supreme Court quotes jury racism in stay of death sentence

In its unanimous decision, the Washington High Court cited research indicating the impact of race on juries' decisions to impose a death sentence.

According to Kreitzberg, a number of studies have shown that black defendants are not more likely to receive the most severe sentence, but that the presence of white victims is also the most statistically significant factor in the delivery of such sentences.

While African Americans make up about 13 percent of the US population, they account for 34.3 percent of executions, according to statistics from the death penalty information center. More surprisingly, 76% of the victims in the cases that resulted in execution were white.

The history of the South and the prevailing attitudes that have led to some of these figures can help maintain the death penalty in force in the region, even if it continues to fall in disfavor elsewhere.

"It is hard to imagine that the link between slavery, lynching and the death penalty was a coincidence," said Kreitzberg. "There is certainly a link between those who are in their historical development."

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