Pa. House Judiciary Committee sets vote on death penalty repeal bill
JOHN FINNERTY
Capitolwire
The House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to meet Tuesday to consider legislation that would formally eliminate the death penalty.
Gov. Josh Shapiro announced earlier this year that he would not allow any executions to take place while he’s governor and he called on the General Assembly to act to formally abolish capital punishment in Pennsylvania.
House Bill 99 would do just that.
“Pennsylvania should join the 23 other states that have abolished the death penalty. Legislators from across the ideological spectrum have coalesced to end capital punishment in their respective states because they acknowledge the various reasons the government putting people to death should not persist,” Rep. Chris Rabb, D-Philadelphia, the prime sponsor of HB 999, said in a cosponsor memo for the bill. “The number of individuals on Pennsylvania’s death row and the number of new death sentences has been declining steadily since the late 1990s; so have the number of new death sentences.”
The state hasn’t executed an inmate since 1999 even though there are 98 inmates on death row. The last time the state came close to executing an inmate was in 2015 when former Gov. Tom Corbett signed an execution warrant for Terrance Williams, who had been sentenced to death for the 1987 killing of a church deacon in a Philadelphia graveyard. But before Williams could be executed, Mr. Corbett was succeeded by former Gov. Tom Wolf, who granted a reprieve to halt the execution. Three people have been executed since the state reinstated the death penalty in the 1990s.
All three “had psychiatric problems” and waived their appeals, according to a 2018 task force report on capital punishment.
As a result, Pennsylvania’s last involuntary execution was in 1962. According to that 2018 report, by then, 35 inmates had died on death row while awaiting execution since 1987.
And more than three-times as many death row inmates have been exonerated as have been executed. Eleven death row inmates have been exonerated, including five since that 2018 report was issued.
In addition to House Bill 999, the Judiciary Committee is also scheduled to review House Bill 751, which set a higher bar for prosecutors to clear in order for the death penalty to be handed down by a judge.
Currently, after a defendant is convicted, prosecutors and defense attorneys present aggravating and mitigating factors before the jury and the jurors are asked to determine if the aggravating circumstances outweigh those mitigating factors “by the preponderance of the evidence.”
Under House Bill 751, that “preponderance of the evidence” standard would be replaced by a “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard.
“(Beyond a reasonable doubt) is the burden of proof instruction given by the judge to the jury for deciding whether the accused is guilty or not guilty of the murder charge. It should also be the burden of proof in the decision of the jury as to the imposition of the death penalty for purposes of consistency in the jury instructions and fairness in the decision-making process before the Commonwealth may take someone’s life,” Rep. Tim Bonner, R-Mercer, the prime sponsor of that bill, said in a cosponsor memo. “The Commonwealth should not take someone’s life unless there is no reasonable doubt in the decision of the jury that the aggravating factors outweigh the mitigating factors.”
https://www.post-gazette.com/news/cr...s/202310290094
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