Opinion: PA gets closer to sounding death knell for death penalty

Something is happening around the politics of the death penalty in Pennsylvania. No longer the hypercharged issue of the past, there is now a growing consensus that capital punishment is so problematic that it’s best to do away with it.

In the General Assembly, a conservative Republican from Lebanon County, Rep. Russ Diamond, has introduced a bill to repeal capital punishment as a sentencing option for first-degree murder. That bill has both Republican and Democratic co-sponsors, as it has in previous sessions when Rep. Chris Rabb, a Philadelphia Democrat, introduced the same legislation. 

In the last six years, Pennsylvania juries have issued a mere three death sentences. That’s a big shift from the peak of capital punishment in the 1990s and 2000s, when there were typically 10 to 20 new death sentences every year. 

And Larry Krasner just won the Philadelphia Democratic primary for district attorney and is likely headed to a third term while unequivocally opposing the death penalty. 

It’s showing in gubernatorial politics, too. In 2014, Democrat Tom Wolf completed a candidate questionnaire in which he expressed his support for a moratorium on executions. His opponent, incumbent Governor Tom Corbett, never made an issue of Wolf’s position.

Wolf won that election and, less than two months after taking office, instituted a moratorium. Republicans in the legislature balked, and district attorneys went to court to overturn the suspension of executions, a case they lost in a unanimous ruling by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. 

Three years later, Wolf cruised to reelection.

While Josh Shapiro was largely mum about the death penalty during his 2022 run for governor, he, too, used the occasion of his first weeks in office to stake a position on capital punishment. In February 2023, Shapiro announced that he would continue the moratorium and went a step further than his predecessor by calling on the legislature to repeal the death penalty altogether.

Shapiro’s statement was met with little protest, in contrast to the reaction when Wolf initially implemented the moratorium.

Krasner’s electoral strength as a DA opposed to the death penalty highlights a remarkable evolution in a city where the district attorney’s office was once led by someone who was known as the nation’s “deadliest DA.” From 1991 to 2010, then-District Attorney Lynne Abraham secured 108 death sentences. 

In the years since, most of those sentences and more than a dozen of those convictions have been overturned due to serious problems with those cases. 

For his part, Krasner has not filed capital charges in any homicide case since his inauguration as district attorney in 2018. And in appeals on cases from his predecessors, his office has conceded error where appropriate. 

Krasner also has empowered the DA office’s conviction integrity unit to examine past cases, which has led to the exoneration of nearly 50 people wrongfully convicted of murder, three of whom were sentenced to death and numerous others who wrongfully faced capital charges – a devastating indictment of prior police and prosecutorial practices.

Diamond, meanwhile, laid out his rationale for working to end the death penalty shortly after introducing his bill, citing both philosophical and practical reasons. He explained that the existence of capital punishment inherently leads to the risk of executing an innocent person, is costly to taxpayers (to the tune of nearly $1 billion), and has a disproportionate impact on people based on income and their inability to afford quality counsel, their race and where the crime occurred.  

Rabb’s version of the repeal legislation passed out of committee on a bipartisan vote in 2023, the farthest a repeal bill has moved in the General Assembly. While that bill did not get a floor vote in the House, we can see where this issue is headed. When a progressive prosecutor and principled conservatives have come to the same conclusion, the politics of the death penalty are clearly changing. 

Increasingly, Pennsylvanians recognize the challenges associated with carrying out capital punishment. Jurors, elected officials and most prosecutors have lost their appetite for the ultimate punishment.

Throughout Pennsylvania, the death penalty is increasingly irrelevant, both in politics and in the criminal legal system. Opponents of capital punishment have yet to achieve their ultimate goal of abolition. But Pennsylvanians are hearing their message: we can live – and are better off – without the death penalty.