Is it the Legislature’s job to decide the fate of the death penalty?

The effort to abolish the death penalty in Washington state is once again back before state lawmakers. This time, however, Democrats control both chambers and backers are hopeful they may be able to get it done this session.

King, Snohomish prosecutors’ opposing views

The bill would abolish the death penalty in favor or life without the possibility of parole.

State Attorney General Bob Ferguson, who is pushing the legislation, told lawmakers during a hearing in the Senate Law and Justice Committee that, on top of the moral questions surrounding the death penalty, there are other issues such as the cost, that make it disproportionate with only a handful of counties in the state even able to afford to bring death penalty cases.

There’s also the success rate to think about.

“Even if sought, often those death penalty convictions are overturned on appeal. I’ll give you a number. Since 1997 in Washington state, 75 percent of death penalty cases have been reversed. Where else in government are we satisfied with a program that costs taxpayers millions of dollars.”

King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg spoke in favor of doing away with the death penalty, saying capital punishment does nothing for public safety and that a sentence of life without parole is equivalent to a death sentence.

“They’re going to die in prison and the fight over capital punishment is when. Can the state hasten the date of their death? Can we authorize a state employee to administer a lethal injection after we get through all of the court processes? My conclusion now is that that fight is not worth it. It’s not worth it to the taxpayers. It’s not worth it to the families. This is unnecessary. There is also no evidence that the death penalty is a deterrent to crime. In my experience people who commit violent crimes don’t think about the legal consequences of what they’re doing, they just are doing what they’re doing.”

But Kitsap County Sheriff Gary Simpson told lawmakers the death penalty absolutely acts as a deterrent.

“A couple years ago in Bremerton, a 21-year-old was contemplating killing his grandfather. He researched the death penalty online and when he learned there was a moratorium put on by our governor, he thought he was free and clear he went and killed his grandfather. The death penalty can be a deterrent.”

Satterberg argued the long, drawn-out appeal process in death penalty cases is tough on families, who could get the same closure with the shorter process of getting a life without parole sentence.

But Snohomish County Prosecutor Mark Roe strongly disagrees. He read a letter from the father of corrections officer Jayme Biendl, who was murdered at the Monroe Corrections Facility in 2011 by an inmate, Byron Scherf, who was already serving a life sentence.

Scherf was sentenced to death for Biendl’s murder.

“This is simply doing away with the only viable deterrent to committing these murderous acts. These people are monsters and have to be dealt with accordingly, they do not deserve anything less than the exact punishment they bestow on their victim,” the letter from Biendl’s father read. “When there is a perpetrator that openly confesses to premeditated murder, such as in the case of my daughter Jaime and shows absolutely no remorse, I say they deserve no less than capital punishment. In the case of the murder of my daughter abolishing the death penalty effectively removes the only punishment that remains for that offender.”

Roe told lawmakers about how the brother of 21-year-old Holly Washa, who was tortured and killed in 1991, told him he felt after her killer, Cal Coburn Brown, was finally executed in 2010.

Roe says Washa’s bother told him:

“I thought about him at breakfast. When I was having breakfast I wondered what he was having. I thought about him when I was watching TV, if he liked that show if he was watching that in his comfortable cell. And every time I thought about him I thought about what he did to my sister and how she died and the terror that she felt. But from the day you called me from Walla Walla and told me that he was dead a curious thing happened, I never think about him anymore.”

Family members of victims also spoke against the bill including Jessie Trapp who’s mother was murdered by Cecil Davis in 1996. The killer got life without parole for that murder, but is on death row for murdering another woman in 1997 and was close to being executed in 2014, right before the Governor placed the moratorium on executions.

“And that devastated my family. My family wanted the relief of knowing that he was going to be executed. Even though it wasn’t for our family, that was still justice for our family.”

Former Bremerton Police Chief Steve Strachan, who now heads the Washington Association of Sheriff’s and Police Chiefs, testified against ending the death penalty. Strachan told lawmakers a recent poll of WASPC members found just three who supported abolishing the death penalty

Several others spoke in favor of abolishing capital punishment, including a representative from the Seattle Archdiocese and the Innocence Project.

Other big issues raised during the hearing were whether or not having the death penalty would take away from prosecutors being able to get guilty pleas in murder cases, where sometimes a killer may plead guilty so they get life without parole instead of facing the death penalty. But Satterberg said that kind of leverage can be dangerous and lead to wrongful convictions.

But one of the biggest issues to come up was whether deciding the future of the death penalty was the Legislature’s job. Several county prosecutors who testified, including Roe, said they wanted this to go to voters in a referendum.

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