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Thread: Oregon Capital Punishment News

  1. #21
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Moratorium on death penalty to continue

    Oregon’s new governor, Kate Brown, announced Friday that she will continue for now the moratorium on the state’s death penalty, instituted by her predecessor, John Kitzhaber.

    In her first meeting with the media, Brown also said that she and her husband will move into Mahonia Hall, the governor’s official residence in Salem, full time. Kitzhaber split his time between Salem and Portland.

    During the 20-minute press conference, Brown appeared relaxed, striking an often-jovial tone. She noted that she and Kitzhaber, who was known for being aloof and reserved, “have very different personalities.” She began her press conference by asking every media member to individually introduce themselves.

    Brown was sworn in as governor on Wednesday, replacing Kitzhaber, who was forced out by an influence-peddling scandal centered around his fiancée, Cylvia Hayes.

    Brown was cautious Friday about weighing in on specific legislation, the state budget, or outlining an agenda, though she said she will bring her “own imprint” to the governor’s office.

    For example, Brown expressed support for implementing a low-carbon fuels standard in Oregon — which has been the most controversial issue of the session so far. But she stopped short of saying definitively that she would sign the bill if it reaches her desk.

    “For me, clean fuels translates into cleaner air for Oregonians,” she said. “I think that’s a good thing.”

    Brown said that her education priorities are reducing class sizes and closing the achievement gap between white students and students of color. She added that she supports Kitzhaber’s desire to bolster funding for early education.

    Brown elaborated on her plans to give the Oregon Government Ethics Commission more power, saying that she would like to give the agency additional resources to conduct investigations and to remove the governor’s power to block commission appointees.

    Asked about a backlog of public records requests from media organizations left behind by Kitzhaber, Brown said she hopes to release “as quickly as possible as many records as we are able to release.”

    Asked about whether she would consider a pardon for Kitzhaber, should he be convicted of any crimes, Brown said it’s too early to speculate.

    Brown said that her rapid ascent after Kitzhaber’s resignation was “a bittersweet moment.” Trying to take over as the state’s chief executive in a few days is “a bit like drinking out of a firehose.”

    Brown also addressed a prepared statement she sent out on the morning of Feb. 12. That statement was the first in a string of statements by Oregon’s top elected officials that criticized Kitzhaber and pressured him to resign. The following day he announced his intention to resign.

    In her Feb. 12 statement, Brown recounted how Kitzhaber, earlier that week, had asked her to return immediately from a Washington, D.C., conference for a one-on-one talk.

    When she arrived in Oregon for the meeting with Kitzhaber, however, he asked her why she had returned from Washington, and then proceeded to say he would not resign. In her Feb. 12 statement, Brown termed the situation “bizarre and unprecedented.”

    “It was really important for me ... that Oregonians knew the truth about what happened,” she said Friday.

    Brown also said she met with Kitzhaber on Monday, before he left office. In what she called a “productive” meeting, Kitzhaber discussed his proposed agenda and initiatives with her, Brown said.

    A special election will take place in 2016 to finish the last two years of Kitzhaber’s term. Brown said it’s too early to announce whether she will run in that election.

    Brown also announced that she will name her replacement as secretary of state on March 7.

    http://registerguard.com/rg/news/loc...7-75/story.csp
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  2. #22
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    Opinion:

    David Sarasohn: Oregon maintains only the illusion of a death penalty


    By David Sarasohn
    The Oregonian

    For whatever reason, Pope Francis, in his historic visit to the United States, did not make it to Portland. Maybe nobody told him about our South American food carts, or someone was worried about the Popemobile getting bogged down in a sea of bicycles.

    But as he spoke to Congress Thursday, there were passages that seemed to speak directly to us.

    When he spoke about immigrants — "We, the people of this continent, are not fearful of foreigners, because most of us were once foreigners... When the stranger in our midst appeals to us, we must not repeat the sins and the errors of the past" — Francis might have found a more responsive audience here than among most of the congressmen and senators he was addressing.

    When he pleaded for steps "to avert the most serious effects of the environmental deterioration caused by human activity," he may not have made much progress among senators who consider global warming "the greatest hoax" in human history. But Francis might have gotten a closer hearing in a place that, once again, has just had the hottest summer in its history, on a coast in the midst of a near-biblical drought, with countless counties declared disaster zones.

    Francis may have spoken most topically to Oregon when he declared his determination "from the beginning of my ministry, to advocate at different levels for the global abolition of the death penalty. ... Recently, my brother bishops here in the United States renewed their call for the abolition of the death penalty. Not only do I support them, but I also offer encouragement to all those who are convinced that a just and necessary punishment must never exclude the dimension of hope and the goal of rehabilitation."

    Rehabilitation of those on Oregon's death row may seem a distant and implausible vision. But Francis was speaking in the same week as yet another development in Oregon's continuing inability to find an acceptable way of dealing with the death penalty, leading to a deepening discomfort with having one at all.

    Several years ago, former Gov. John Kitzhaber — who during the 1990s became the only Oregon governor in the last 50 years to sign execution orders, although our death row has become a high-density residential area — announced that as long as he was governor, there would be no more executions. Some people complained that Kitzhaber hadn't said this when running for the job in 2010, but his clear opposition to capital punishment didn't keep him from being re-elected in 2014. (What kept him from still being governor, of course, was something else entirely.)

    When Secretary of State Kate Brown succeeded Kitzhaber in February, she said she would continue the execution moratorium while setting up a process to assess it. As The Oregon/OregonLive's Denis C. Theriault reported this month, not much has happened to move things along. Brown's spokeswoman Kristen Grainger did tell Theriault that Brown has directed her office attorney, Ben Souede, to seek "legal advice about the practical aspects related to capital punishment in Oregon," although there might not be any actual recommendations until deep into next year, when Brown runs for re-election.

    The problems with Oregon's death penalty have long been clear: The highly expensive legal process takes decades; Oregon has more than 30 inmates on death row, but no executions actually expected for years; the only executions scheduled in the decades since the death penalty was restored were at the request of the convict, not exactly a testament to its deterrent power.

    This year, a similar situation caused the Legislature in deep-red Nebraska to abolish its death penalty and then override the governor's veto. Last month, the Connecticut Supreme Court, ruling that the state's recent abolition extended to all its death row inmates, quoted Ninth Circuit appeals judge Alex Kozinski: "[W]e have little more than an illusion of a death penalty in this country. ... Whatever purposes the death penalty is said to serve — deterrence, retribution, assuaging the pain suffered by victims' families — these purposes are not served by the system as it now operates."

    From either the pope's principles or Kozinski's reality, it's hard to argue for Oregon to continue pretending to have capital punishment.

    "A good political leader is one who, with the interests of all in mind, seizes the moment in a spirit of openness and pragmatism," Francis said Thursday. "A good political leader always opts to initiate processes rather than possessing spaces."

    On a number of issues, this advice might have arrived too late for this Congress.

    But it might still work in Salem.

    http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/in...elated_stories
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
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  3. #23
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    Opinion:

    Eliminate the death penalty, and you'll end up with killers back on the streets

    By Joshua Marquis
    The Oregonian

    The Oregonian editorial board has changed its mind on the death penalty at least four times in the last 20 years. Even more frequently than Oregon voters. In the 20th century, Oregonians have voted five times to either abolish or restore capital punishment. The last two times, in 1977 and 1984, the vote was to restore the penalty.

    If there is, in fact, a vote, it will be interesting to see how much of the "abolition" money comes from billionaires opposing the death penalty (both right and left wing ones). First, they are trying — and sometimes succeeding — in buying elections in states in which they do not live. Millions of dollars in political advertising can sell any number of urban myths as true. More importantly, the families of the wealthy are usually not the victims of murder. The victims are poor children, women and people of color.

    Second, name a single person sentenced to death since Oregon reinstituted the death penalty who was later found to be innocent. That number is zero. Yet, the myth persists that we have executed the innocent.

    Opponents of the death penalty have made it clear that once that battle is won, their next target will be attacking life without parole (LWOP) arguing that it violates the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. There have already been some court decisions forbidding LWOP for murder in other states.

    To think that taking the rarely sought death penalty off the table will save buckets of money is naive at best.

    People like Ward Weaver pled guilty to avoid the death penalty. If that possibility had not been there, the trials to avoid LWOP would be just as long, just as expensive, just as draining for the victims' survivors.

    Anyone who watches murder cases progress knows that a person who isn't facing the death penalty (he might, for example have been extradited from Mexico, which will only extradite on agreement the killer not face death) has just as much incentive to tap the enormous tax-paid public defense system, which generally offers excellent, if expensive, representation. In order to get the chance for parole (the next penalty down from LWOP), the defense will have at least two experienced defense lawyers, investigators, mitigation specialists, psychologists and jury consultants. Nobody wants to spend their life in prison. In the criminal justice system, where there's life, there is always hope for parole.

    For anyone who thinks a mass commutation or changing the Constitution to forbid capital punishment means former death row murderers will never leave prison: Dream on. Apart from the fact that in the modern era Oregon's first death row inmate escaped from prison, other murderers already doing life killed again in prison. Without a death penalty and the announced elimination of the Intensive Management Unit (it had been called "the prison within the prison" for particularly hard cases), there is very little disincentive for someone who has shown a propensity to kill to change his ways.

    Beyond that, eight of the men on death row committed their murders before LWOP was made law. We really have no idea if the courts will even uphold LWOP as it has only existed for 25 years in Oregon. For those men, abolition of Oregon's death penalty means two things will happen for those inmates: First, since a punishment cannot be imposed ex post facto under constitutional law, those inmates will get the next harshest sentence available. Consequently, a parole board hearing will be likely and victims' families will have to listen to their loved ones' killers plead for freedom. Second, the minimum sentence before 1990 was 30 years, so a quarter of those on death row could walk out of prison. If you think that's impossible, ask the scores of victims of murderers who were slaughtered across America after their killers were legally released from a so-called "life sentence."

    Psychologists tell us that the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. This doesn't just apply to people; it also applies to institutions. Until Measure 11 ensured that murderers sentenced to life served at least 25 years, the average time served in Oregon for a "life sentence" for murder was eight years.

    http://www.oregonlive.com/opinion/in...enalty_an.html
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  4. #24
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Former Gov. John Kitzhaber: Oregon's Death Penalty Needs Scrutiny

    John Kitzhaber has a unique place in Oregon's history with the death penalty: He's the only Oregon governor since the early 1960s to oversee executions. In 1996, during his first term, Kitzhaber allowed Douglas Wright to be executed by lethal injection. The next year, he allowed the same for Harry Moore. Both men had dropped their appeals.

    As part of our series of conversations about the death penalty, "Think Out Loud" host Dave Miller talked with Kitzhaber about this experience and how it led him to impose a moratorium on capital punishment in Oregon in 2011.

    When he first ran for governor in 1994, Kitzhaber said he didn't think it would come up: "There might have been a question or two, but (the death penalty) just wasn't a central issue."

    Then he was confronted by Wright's and Moore's cases.

    Kitzhaber said before an execution, governors are given all of the court files on the condemned inmate. "There was nothing to suggest these people were innocent," he said. "They’d committed really, terrible, terrible crimes, no question about it."

    Kitzhaber said he was troubled by the idea of the state ending a life, and that his ethics as a former emergency room doctor certainly played into the equation.

    "It was undoubtedly the most difficult decision I ever had to make in public office," Kitzhaber said. "I was torn between my own personal convictions about the morality of the death penalty and my oath to uphold the constitution."

    Kitzhaber described the two special phone lines that were installed in his office — one to the attorney general and the other into the execution chamber. Kitzhaber said the last communication before Wright died was a call at 11:55 p.m. from the head of the Department of Corrections, who told him that the execution would proceed.

    "And at that moment, you're the only person on the planet who can stop the execution. And then there's a long 10–15 minutes, and then you get a call that says he was pronounced dead," Kitzhaber said. "And it was extraordinarily difficult and very personal."

    Kitzhaber emphasized more than once during the 23-minute interview that he did not think — neither then nor now — that the inmates on death row "were good people."

    In fact, he said he "didn't have any compassion" for Wright or Moore.

    "My compassion is certainly with their victims, but their crimes were no different than 30 some other people on death row. The only difference is that they volunteered to die," Kitzhaber said.

    Kitzhaber ran for a third term in 2010 — unprecedented in the state — and won.

    "I never thought I'd be governor again and be put in that position again. But I think the system, even if you support the death penalty, I don't think people intended it to allow the individual inmate to decide if and when the execution will take place," he said.

    When two-time convicted murderer Gary Haugen's death warrant was signed in 2011, it forced Kitzhaber to confront the death penalty head-on. He said he chose to impose a moratorium on capital punishment, and he would do it again — though if he had the opportunity, he might consider commutation as well. Kitzhaber said it was because of his experience of feeling like the executioner for Wright and Moore that he could not preside over an execution again.

    "The death penalty is sort of the summit, the pinnacle of just an unjust justice system. We know the relationship between poverty, between domestic violence, between substance abuse, and child neglect and people who end up in the criminal justice system, " he said. "And we spend millions and millions of dollars on this question of whether to execute someone or not, and we ignore the investments that could actually keep people out of the system in the first place."

    Kitzhaber said he called the families of Haugen's victims, calls that were not particularly well received. But he said he felt he "owed it to them to explain my decision."

    He said he tried to explain his conviction that he couldn't "serve as an executioner anymore." And he said the larger point is that Oregon's system of capital punishment is not operating as it was designed to operate.

    "I personally think it ought to be repealed and replaced with life without parole," Kitzhaber said. "What I was hoping was to jump start the conversation, because even if I had commuted the row, the death penalty would still be in place. And the real issue is not the commutation. It's having another discussion about the death penalty."

    That's something that Kitzhaber did not see in his third term or the first month of his fourth term, which ended abruptly with his resignation in 2015. But he said he's encouraged by Gov. Kate Brown's choice to continue the moratorium, and he's hopeful that wider public dialogue may still be sparked.

    Editor's note: We are looking forward to talking with Kitzhaber about the issues surrounding his resignation when the federal investigation is completed. The scope of this interview was focused exclusively on the death penalty and issues surrounding capital punishment.

    http://ijpr.org/post/former-gov-john...utiny#stream/0
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

    "Y'all be makin shit up" ~ Markeith Loyd

  5. #25
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
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    Lawyers argue Oregon's death penalty

    Most Oregon lawyers never deal with cases involving the death penalty.

    But as part of their requirement by the Oregon State Bar for continuing legal education, a group of them heard from two lawyers experienced in it during a session at bar offices in Tigard.

    Josh Marquis has been a county prosecutor for four decades, the past 23 years as the elected district attorney of Clatsop County.

    Jeff Ellis is a Portland lawyer who specializes in criminal defense, and as director of the Oregon Capital Resource Center, has been involved in cases in Oregon and other states.

    Oregon is among the 31 states, plus the federal government, with the death penalty. Oregon is also one of four states where the governor has called a temporary halt to executions.

    Thirty-three men and one woman await execution in the Oregon State Penitentiary. Two men were executed by lethal injection most recently 20 years ago; both waived further appeals.

    Oregon voters have gone back and forth on the death penalty since the state took over responsibility for executions in 1903. A repeal measure may appear again on a statewide ballot, although death penalty opponents have not advanced it.

    When Oregon voters reinstated the death penalty in 1984, it applies to aggravated murder — circumstances are specified by law — and it is exempt from the state constitutional ban on vindictive justice.

    "It is a rare sentence, and very few murderers deserve it," Marquis said. "But there are some people who I believe are beyond redemption."

    He described them as "people who have such deep sociopathic, antisocial personalities that either they do not care about anybody — or worse, they actually like to inflict pain, particularly on vulnerable people."

    Despite his outspoken support for the death penalty, Marquis said he has sought it for only two offenders during 40 years as a prosecutor.

    He sought it three times for Randy Lee Guzek, who was convicted of a double murder in Terrebonne in 1987, when Marquis was chief deputy district attorney in Deschutes County. The Oregon Supreme Court upheld Guzek's death sentence in 2015; Guzek's appeal is pending in federal courts.

    "I suspect that Mr. Guzek will probably outlive me on death row," said Marquis, who is 17 years older. "I will probably die of natural causes before he dies of natural causes."

    He also sought it for Anthony Scott Garner, convicted in 2001 of the 1997 murder of an informant in Warrenton. But the jury sentenced Garner to life imprisonment without parole.

    "That is really what the death penalty process attempts to do," Marquis said. "It allows 12 jurors to decide whether a person has any possibility of either being redeemed or redeeming himself."

    Under current procedure, jurors must first decide an offender's guilt, then in a separate penalty phase, answer "yes" to four questions before imposing the death penalty.

    Ellis, who has taken part in Guzek's case, also has a strong belief on the death penalty.

    "I think it is morally wrong. I think the state should not be in the business of killing individuals in our name," he said. "But that does not get us very far, because reasonable people can disagree about that position."

    He took issue with Marquis' argument that Oregon's death penalty should apply only to criminal offenders beyond redemption.

    "I guess he has a vision of an Oregon death penalty system that is not the system that has been operating since the mid-1980s in Oregon. Instead we have a system that is chockfull of problems," Ellis said.

    Of the offenders sentenced to death, Ellis said, the only two actually executed waived appeals — and no other case (until Guzek) has moved on to federal appellate review.

    "Eventually we will have a small and random group of individuals who were sentenced to death, who lost on appeal and in post-conviction, and lost in (federal) habeas corpus," he said. "Are these people the worst of the worst? Absolutely not."

    Penalty is final

    According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 1,442 executions have taken place since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the death penalty to resume in 1976. Marquis said that number is a fraction of about 600,000 murders during that period.

    Texas leads with 538 executions, and according to the center's definition of the region, the South accounts for a total of 1,175. (Ten of the 11 states in the former Confederacy are in the top 14 states for executions; the exception is Tennessee.)

    "Unlike any other punishment, the death penalty is irreversible when inflicted," Ellis said.

    He mentioned the case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas in 2004 for the 1991 arson murder of three children. A subsequent report disputed whether the fire was arson, although the fire agency says the report overlooked some points.

    "The criminal justice system does not do a good job with claims of innocence," Ellis said.

    Marquis said it is the "worst nightmare" of prosecutors to convict an innocent person.

    "Innocent people have been on death row," Marquis said. "Anyone who denies that is not being honest."

    But Marquis said even the most ardent opponents of Oregon's death penalty have yet to make a case for absolving any of the 34 on Oregon's death row.

    Marquis cited the case of Roger Coleman, who was executed in Virginia in 1992 for the rape and murder of his sister-in-law, despite death-penalty foes raising doubts. A DNA test performed in 2006 confirmed Coleman's guilt.

    "The story sank faster than dropping a 10-pound weight into the deepest part of the Columbia River channel," he said.

    Which way?

    According to a 2016 report by the Death Penalty Information Center, the past year resulted in the fewest death sentences imposed in the United States in the past 40 years, and the fewest executions since 1991.

    Seven states in the past decade have abolished the death penalty. But Marquis said all of them occurred because of legislative or court actions — and when the question was put Nov. 8 in California, Nebraska and Oklahoma, voters upheld the death penalty.

    (In Nebraska, voters overturned a 2015 legislative repeal. In Oklahoma, second only to Texas in executions since 1976, voters approved a measure allowing any form of execution not specifically barred by the U.S. Supreme Court.)

    When then-Gov. John Kitzhaber issued a temporary reprieve to Gary Haugen, who was within two weeks of execution in 2011, Kitzhaber also imposed a moratorium on executions. Haugen won a challenge to his unsought reprieve in circuit court, but the Oregon Supreme Court in 2013 upheld the governor's broad constitutional authority to grant clemency — including the reprieve.

    "I think the declaration of a reprieve and a moratorium was undertaken by Gov. Kitzhaber for very serious and real reasons," said Ellis, one of four signers of a letter that Kitzhaber considered before announcing a moratorium on Nov. 22, 2011.

    The 2013 Legislature gave only a single hearing to Kitzhaber's proposed constitutional amendment to substitute life imprisonment for the death penalty.

    Gov. Kate Brown continued the moratorium upon succeeding Kitzhaber in February 2015, and it will last as long as she holds office. She was elected Nov. 8 to the two years remaining in Kitzhaber's term.

    "If she thinks it is so wrong, that it is so egregious and she believes there are innocent people on death row, she has the power of commutation. Good luck," said Marquis, who has been an outspoken critic of the moratorium.

    Were she to commute death sentences to life imprisonment, he added, "If she stands for office in two years, I suspect she would not get re-elected."

    A ballot question?

    Oregonians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty is conducting a campaign to raise awareness, but so far, the group has not petitioned for any ballot initiative to abolish it. They say they are determining lawmakers' attitudes in the 2017 session, which gets down to business Feb. 1.

    "I can assure you that the Oregon Legislature does not have the guts to change the Constitution — they will refer it to the voters," Marquis said, although the Legislature is required to refer any constitutional amendment to a statewide vote.

    "I've been part of this conversation for the past 17 years in this state. We have talked this to death. If the voters choose to abolish the death penalty, so be it."

    Voters shifted 14 years later, but Oregon in 1964 was the most recent state to repeal the death penalty by popular vote. Marquis said he remembers that at 12 years old, he put a pro-repeal sticker on the rear bumper of his father's Ford Falcon.

    Although no one has been released so far under a "true" life-imprisonment law for aggravated murder took effect in 1991, Marquis said he believes opponents would challenge it based on the federal constitutional guarantee against "cruel and unusual punishment."

    But Ellis said life imprisonment without parole is a good alternative to the death penalty — and he would not challenge it for adults.

    "If a person is innocent and we have sentenced him to life, we cannot give back the years he lost, but we can release him and given him some compensation," Ellis said. "We can keep our communities safe with life without parole — and I think we can keep prisons safe even with individuals who have committed murder."

    http://www.pamplinmedia.com/go/42-ne...-death-penalty
    An uninformed opponent is a dangerous opponent.

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  6. #26
    Moderator Ryan's Avatar
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    Ex-Gov. Kitzhaber discusses death penalty, alternatives

    John Kitzhaber placed a moratorium on death penalties in 2011, which current Governor Kate Brown still upholds

    PORTLAND, Ore. (KOIN) — Nearly 6 years ago, former Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber announced a state-wide moratorium on death penalties, saying “I refuse to be a part of this compromised and inequitable system any longer.”

    On Wednesday night, at a public meeting of Oregonians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty in Beaverton, Kitzhaber said he should’ve placed a moratorium on it earlier.

    “It was the right thing to do,” said Kitzhaber, who oversaw the state’s last two executions in 1996 and 1997. “It’s what I should’ve done 20 years ago — I didn’t, but I can’t change that. But I’m here tonight because I want to do all I can to help you and other like-minded Oregonians have a good honest debate to this and find alternatives to the death penalty.”

    The night’s conversation centered around the death penalty and possible alternatives.

    “More and more people in this country I think agree there are better ways to provide that needed punishment rather than killing people.” Kitzhaber said.

    Kitzhaber wasn’t the only person at Wednesday’s meeting with a connection to the last 2 state executions.

    Frank Thompson was the superintendent at the Oregon State Penitentiary during that time. He used to be in favor of the death penalty. Now, as a member of the Oregonians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, he supports alternative methods.

    “For capital punishment there are alternative ways — and that’s life without the possibility of parole,” Thompson said. “There are states in this country that have life without the possibility of parole and they are not clamoring to change their way of dealing with capital crimes.”

    A conversation about the death penalty also means a conversation about its cost. The Oregonians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty says the state spends $29 million annually on prosecution and defense on these capital cases, which can be carried out for years due to a lengthy appeal process.

    “The due process is just a costly undertaking,” Thompson said.

    Whatever the alternative is, Kitzhaber wishes he would’ve used it well before he instituted the moratorium back in 2011.

    “Those two deaths haunted me for years,” Kitzhaber said of the state executions he oversaw. “Still haunt me.”

    http://koin.com/2017/08/24/ex-gov-ki...-in-beaverton/

  7. #27
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    The last time Oregon had a Republican governor was 30 years ago. So, I don't see this policy being changed anytime soon.

  8. #28
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    I just read an editorial on OregonLive urging Gov. Kate Brown to commute every sentence on death row. I hope for Heaven's sake she does not.

  9. #29
    Senior Member Frequent Poster joe_con's Avatar
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    Doesn't matter if she does or does not the DP in Oregon is in name only

  10. #30
    Senior Member CnCP Addict one_two_bomb's Avatar
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    You took the words right out of my mouth joe con. If they don't use it might as well get rid of it.

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