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Here's some background on Pennsylvania's death penalty system. Since 1978, PA has imposed 441 death sentences and 270 of those sentences have been overturned on appeal. That's an error rate of over 60%!
Six innocent people have been exonerated and freed from death row after wrongful convictions in Pennsylvania. 37 people have died of natural causes or suicide on death row. Only three people have been executed and all of them voluntarily dropped their appeals.
In 2018, a Joint State Government Commission found that Pennsylvania's death penalty system is unreliable, arbitrary, and unjustified. The Commission identified several specific problems but the legislature has not attempted to make any changes.
Pennsylvania's constitution contains a section that bans all "cruel punishments." This is different from the U.S. Constitution's 8th Amendment that bans "cruel and unusual punishment." The Pennsylvania Constitution's protections are broader.
State constitutions in Washington and Massachusetts also ban all "cruel punishments" just like the Pennsylvania Constitution. Both the Washington Supreme Court and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court found the death penalty unconstitutional under their constitutions.
127 death sentences have been overturned in Pennsylvania due to ineffective assistance of defense counsel. There is no state funding for capital defense lawyers and no requirement to follow the American Bar Association's guidelines for death penalty representation.
In 2003, a Pennsylvania Supreme Court committee concluded that there was strong evidence that prosecutors engaged in pervasive discrimination against African Americans during jury selection in death penalty cases.
In 2007, an American Bar Association review found that Pennsylvania prosecutors were "only in partial compliance" at best with their ethical and constitutional duties to disclose important evidence to the defense in death penalty cases.
The primary factors behind death sentences in Pennsylvania are geography, race, intellectual disability, mental illness, and poverty.
Almost half of Pennsylvania's death sentences come from Philadelphia while only 5% come from Allegheny County (Pittsburgh). Philadelphia and Allegheny counties boast comparable populations.
More than half of all death row prisoners in Pennsylvania are African American while African Americans make up only 12% of the state's overall population.
The U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that intellectually disabled defendants cannot be executed. At least 14% of all death row prisoners in Pennsylvania may qualify for a diagnosis of intellectual disability.
At least 25% of all death row prisoners in Pennsylvania suffer with severe mental illnesses and more than half have received mental health treatment at some point in their lives.
A State Government Commission report concluded that at least 80% of all people facing the death penalty in Pennsylvania are poor. I'd guess that number is closer to 100%. I've never met a person with money on death row.
The death penalty is a moral and public policy failure by every measure.
I urge @PAAttorneyGen @JoshShapiroPA to join the rest of the nation and take the moral high ground on the death penalty. Most states are no longer pumping out new death sentences or executing people anymore.
The death penalty frenzy is gone. We know too much now about just how broken the machinery of death is, and how costly. Join us, Attorney General Shapiro. The air is crisp and clean up here, and we see a bright, no-death horizon for all of our people.
