Session: 2023-2024
ACLU-PA Position: Supports
HB 999 (PN 940) would eliminate the death penalty as a sentencing option in Pennsylvania for first-degree murder, murder of an unborn child, and murder of a law enforcement officer.
For over 100 years, the ACLU has opposed the death penalty because it denies equal protection of the laws, is cruel and unusual punishment, and removes guarantees of due process of law. It is so inconsistent with the underlying values of our democratic system—the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness—that the imposition of death for any crime is a denial of civil liberties.
Capital punishment violates the constitutional guarantee of equal protection. The death penalty is, in fact, a constitutionally prohibited denial of equal protection of the law because it is imposed randomly, disproportionately, and discriminatorily. Death sentences are predicted not by the heinousness of the crime but by the race of the accused or the victim, the economic status of the accused, the quality of defense lawyers, and the county and state in which the crime occurred.
Capital punishment denies due process of law. The imposition of the death penalty is often arbitrary and always irrevocable. Someone who has been executed and subsequently found to have been wrongfully convicted has been denied due process of law—forever deprived of the opportunity to benefit from new evidence or new laws that might warrant the reversal of a conviction, or the setting aside of a death sentence. Moreover, the death penalty has a deleterious effect on the administration of justice. The incentive of a capital conviction acts as a spur to the use of unfair or even lawless methods by police and prosecutors, to which is added blatant and emotional coverage by the mass media, all combining to make a fair trial impossible.
Capital punishment is cruel and unusual. Cruel and unusual punishment is prohibited by the Constitution. Its cruelty is a relic of the earliest days of penology, when slavery, branding, and other corporal punishments were commonplace. Like those barbaric practices, executions have no place in a civilized society. Even the administration of executions is utterly flawed—every method of execution comes with an intolerably high risk of extreme pain and torture. Furthermore, it is unusual because the United States is the only western industrialized nation that still permits capital punishment and because only a random sampling of convicted murderers in the U.S. receive a sentence of death.
The death penalty in America is a broken process from start to finish. Public support for the death penalty is falling; the numbers of new death sentences and executions are both rapidly decreasing. The only way to guarantee that no factually innocent person will be executed is to eliminate capital punishment entirely. The time has come to end this failed experiment.
Check the bill's status here.
