A new blog post from Staff Attorney, Frances Harvey.

I joined ACCR as its first Staff Attorney in January of 2023, and a lot has happened already. I seem to have arrived in Pennsylvania at a pivotal moment in the history of its death penalty. On February 16, Governor Shapiro announced he would continue the existing moratorium on executions and called for the General Assembly to abolish the death penalty entirely. The next day, Senators Katie Muth and Sharif Street, and Representative Christopher Rabb, announced their plans to introduce abolition bills in their respective houses.

Last week, our Executive Director Marc Bookman spoke to Susan Shapiro on WGAL 8’s In Focus about Governor Shapiro’s announcement, and the state of the death penalty in Pennsylvania. The other guests, two Pennsylvania Senators, provided shockingly uninformed views that demonstrated what is standing in the way of abolition.

In his interview, Senator Joe Pittman makes it clear that we are not executing people fast enough for his liking. He suggests that we need the death penalty as leverage for obtaining guilty pleas. It is unquestionably wrong to use the threat of death to coerce someone to plead guilty, but unfortunately, what he describes is quite common. In our work we see prosecutors throughout the state leveraging the death penalty to induce guilty pleas regardless of the circumstances of the case. A guilty plea ensures a conviction and a lengthy—and possible life —sentence while sparing the Commonwealth the trouble of proving its case. There’s only one problem—such an improper use of capital punishment runs the very real risk that someone will plead guilty out of fear of a death sentence, which leads directly to wrongful convictions.

Senator Mike Regan discusses his intention to propose a bill that would make the death penalty mandatory for anyone convicted of killing a law enforcement officer. This is a nonstarter; the death penalty can never be mandatory, no matter how heinous the crime or how much we elevate the status of the victim. Statutes mandating a punishment of death for a particular crime have been impermissible since the Supreme Court recognized that individualized sentencing is fundamental to the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment nearly half a century ago. And yet Senator Regan is not the first politician to propose measures that settled law finds offensive to the Eighth Amendment. When seeking the presidency, Donald Trump also promised mandatory executions for the murder of police officers. Governor DeSantis of Florida expressed is seeking to overturn Supreme Court precedent and bring back the death penalty for child rape.

Senator Regan says that it was surprising to him that a former “top cop” like Governor Shapiro would favor abolition. But as Marc says in the segment, it’s not surprising to those of us who know more about the issue. Governor Shapiro said it best himself:

As Attorney General, I had the privilege of seeing our criminal justice system up close as the chief law enforcement officer. Through that experience, two critical truths became clear to me about the capital sentencing system in our Commonwealth: The system is fallible, and the outcome is irreversible.

This is an inescapable quality of any system of capital punishment: the closer you look at it, the less faith you have that it can work. As Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote in his Gregg dissent in 1976, “the American people, fully informed as to the purposes of the death penalty and its liabilities, would in my view reject it as morally unacceptable.” The country has been trying to “fix” the death penalty since Gregg. It is time to acknowledge, as many other states have done, that the problems are inherent in the death penalty itself. Pennsylvania remains an embarrassing outlier in the Northeast, as every state from Virginia to Maine has abolished the death penalty.

It’s easy to talk about a “more violent breed of criminals” who commit “the most heinous crimes,” but is that who’s actually getting sentenced to death? Our work at ACCR, and Governor Shapiro’s experience as Attorney General, has shown us that the people who are sentenced to death are those with the worst lawyers, those with cognitive disabilities, those arrested in the wrong county, and those with other disadvantages cataloged in Marc’s book, A Descending Spiral: Exposing the Death Penalty in 12 Essays. And as Marc notes, it is impossible to separate the death penalty from racism. Senators Pittman and Regan both dismiss Ms. Shapiro’s questions about these issues with platitudes. The only conclusion you can draw from the proposals and rhetoric is that it’s all political posturing – but at the cost of lives.

I’m alarmed but hopeful about what I’ve seen so far. While there is evidence that Pennsylvania is ready to eliminate capital punishment, it’s clear that we cannot rest yet. As long as the death penalty is on the books, our reprieve from executions is precarious. And the proposals to enact unconstitutional statutes is concerning given the current Supreme Court’s disregard for precedent.

We hope the legislature looks closely at the facts and earnestly engages in the moral issue. This is an important opportunity for all who have intimate knowledge of the injustice of the death penalty to make their voices heard and support the governor's moral leadership.