Washington’s death penalty chamber to be preserved for history

A room that hosted decades of death is officially closing. The Washington death penalty chamber is shuttering its heavy metal door, reported The Seattle Times.

The outlet also reported the death chamber will be preserved for history as it was when it was active. It stated the stopped clocks in the chamber are set to 12:56, the time on September 10, 2010, Cal Coburn Brown, the last executed man in the state, was pronounced dead.

Outside the room, there are rows of seats, for witnesses like the victims’ families and journalists, facing a window. There is then a table in which men, as no woman has been executed in Washington, were strapped up to receive the lethal injection, along with a microphone hanging from the ceiling for last words, according to The Seattle Times.

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Above the room is the gallows, with bolts over trap doors, through which the ropes were strung. Above that, are two cells where the men were brought before their execution.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center’s website, Washington abolished the death penalty in 1913 but reinstated it in 1919. It was then abolished again in 1975 and was reinstated the same year.

On February 11, 2014, Governor Jay Inslee announced he would issue a reprieve for any death penalty case that reaches his desk.

The death penalty was then overturned on October 11, 2018, in the case of State v. Gregory, according to the Washington State Department of Corrections (DOC),

“The death penalty is invalid because it is imposed in an arbitrary and racially biased manner,” the Washington Supreme Court said. “The use of the death penalty is unequally applied – sometimes by where the crime took place, or the county of residence, or the available budgetary resources at any given point in time, or the race of the defendant.”

Before the ruling, two methods were legal, hanging and lethal injection. According to The Seattle Times, Washington carried out 78 executions since 1904. The media outlet stated the deaths were mostly by hanging. However, the last three were lethal injections.

Reuters spoke with Richard Morgan, the former Assistant Secretary of Prisons at the DOC who worked to abolish the death penalty.

“I think the death penalty, in general, is too much to ask a servant of the state to do,” Morgan said.

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He believes asking a person to kill someone as their job is too much.

“I care about these people that have to carry out their daily jobs and asking anybody to kill someone is a bridge too far,” he told the Times.

Morgan has spoken out about the law.

“The legal justice system is flawed,” Morgan told Reuters. “It’s a human invention and innocent people do wind up in prison, innocent people can be convicted and sentenced to death and I can’t think of a nightmare worse than being involved in executing somebody that it turns out later never should’ve been.”

There are 27 states that still have capital punishment, according to Cornell Law School, including Oregon, California, Idaho and Montana.

Julia Dallas is a content editor at MyNorthwest. You can read her stories here. Follow Julia on X here and email her here.