Washington officially abolished the use of the death penalty in the Democrat-led state this week when Gov. Jay Inslee signed bill 5087.
, a Democrat, signed a bill this week officially abolishing the death penalty in the Pacific Northwest state nearly 10 years after he initiated a moratorium on capital punishment and five years after the state supreme court struck it down as"unconstitutional."
"It's official," the governor wrote on Twitter Thursday."The death penalty is no longer in state law. In 2014 I issued a moratorium. In 2018 the state Supreme Court deemed the death penalty unconstitutional. Now in 2023, passage of SB 5087 strikes it entirely from our statutes.
The court converted the sentences of the eight people on Washington's death row to life in prison at the time. "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," Chief Justice Mary Fairhurst wrote in the lead opinion.
Defense lawyers had long challenged the death penalty on those grounds, noting the state's worst mass murderers and serial killers, Green River killer Gary Ridgway among them, had received life terms, not death. In a 5-4 ruling in 2006, the justices rejected an argument from a death row inmate that he shouldn't be executed because Ridgway hadn't been executed.
Washington’s last execution took place in 2010 when Cal Brown was given a lethal injection for the brutal rape, torture and murder of 21-year-old Holly Washa in 1991.Washington's last execution was in 2010.
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