CJ Day
Staff Writer
A bill in the Wyoming Legislature that sought to repeal the state’s death penalty statute failed its introductory vote last week, though it carried a record number of sponsors.
House Bill 166, which was written by Rep. Jared Olsen (R) of Cheyenne, would have taken Wyoming’s death penalty statute off the books. It carried over 40 sponsors from both parties, though it narrowly failed its introductory vote. During a session of the legislature focused on the budget like this one, a non-spending bill needs the support of at least two-thirds of the House to be debated on the House floor, and HB166 failed to cross that threshold by three votes.
The death penalty is still a contentious issue among the legislature and the state as a whole, and anti-death penalty advocates have failed to make much progress despite recent efforts.
Last year, a similar bill to HB166 managed to pass the House of Representatives, but it died in the Senate. This bill is the high-water mark for bills aiming to repeal the death penalty as no bills about the issue have reached the senate before or since.
Students at the University of Wyoming seem just as split. Senior Josh Gart is in favor of the death penalty, where he said it is a deterrent for particularly henious crimes.
“The way I see it, you get someone who’s done murders, who’s doing really bad sexual assault, they don’t deserve to live,” Gart said. “I don’t want my tax money going to a pedophile or whatever in prison for life.”
Wyoming currently only has one prisoner on death row. The state courts sentenced murderer and suspected serial killer Dale Eaton to death in 2004, though he received a stay of execution in 2009.
Of the 29 states that still have the death penalty, Wyoming’s death row is the smallest. Since the federal government reinstated the death penalty nationwide in 1976, the state has only executed one person, Mark Hopkinson, in 1992. Death penalty opponents took umbrage with Hopkinson’s execution, as Hopkinson did not actually commit the murders he was charged with; rather, he blackmailed other people into murdering his victims.
Most anti-death penalty advocates do not need that sort of justification to be against it. Garrett Underwood, a junior, said the death penalty is inhumane on the face.
“It just seems really cruel, no matter how bad the stuff they did is,” said Underwood. “I don’t know what gives us the right to kill people, it kind of makes us just as bad as the murderers.”
Other death penalty opponents point out that around 2% of death row inmates have been exonerated since their convictions. In both of Wyoming’s post-1976 death penalty cases, the defendants confessed to the crimes, but with the over 2,500 people on death row in states across the country, a few are bound to be innocent.
Philosophy Professor Susanna Goodin has her own opinions on the morality of the death penalty.
Philosophers have argued back and forth for thousands of years on the topic of the death penalty, and the moral and ethical arguments surrounding it are far to complex to be neatly summed up in one newspaper article, Goodin said. However, there is one thing on the issue she is sure of.
“Even if the death penalty were morally permissible,” said Goodin, “a country filled with such unquestionable racism is not entitled to the death penalty. It’s far too powerful to be misused, and racism shows its misuse.”
A grad student of Goodin’s convinced her of this position. To her, any argument about the death penalty must first reconcile America’s systemic racism.
It seems unlikely that any state representatives will seek to tackle that thorny issue, but one thing is for sure – the effort to repeal Wyoming’s death penalty is not yet dead itself. Olsen, along with other representatives, have vowed to reintroduce bills on the topic in the next legislative session.
