The death penalty in Kentucky: Time for abolition is now
By Allen Ault
Unjust. Unfair. Costly. Dehumanizing.
These concerns reflect the reality of the administration of the death penalty. As
such, they lead to the same inevitable conclusion: It is time to abolish capital
punishment in Kentucky.
It has been four years since an American Bar Association-sponsored
assessment of the use of the death penalty in Kentucky resulted in a report that
revealed serious problems related to fairness and accuracy. These included an
error rate of more than 60 percent, meaning a majority of death sentences were
overturned on appeal; caseloads far exceeding the national average for public
defenders handling capital cases; inadequate protections against death
sentences for defendants with mental disabilities; and no uniform standards on
eyewitness identifications.
These and other findings of the review by a team of Kentucky attorneys, former
judges and law school professors were so numerous and troubling that the report
recommended suspending all executions until the issues were addressed. But
that hasn’t happened. In fact, there have been no significant changes in the
death penalty law since the report was issued.
That means the families of murder victims must continue to live with uncertainty
and the hardships inherent in our criminal justice system.
As an accompanying article by Ben Griffith points out, his brother’s murder led
to long decades of waiting for the system to work through appeals — forcing his
family the relive the horror of their loss. “Is it any wonder that a 2012 study
conducted on the wellbeing of homicide survivors found that those who lived ina
state where the ultimate penalty was life without parole fared much better than
those with the death penalty?” he writes.
The absence of change in Kentucky’s death penalty law also means the state
continues to incur costs that exceed the resources that would be required if life
without parole were the maximum penalty possible.
An article elsewhere on these pages by state Rep. David Floyd provides more
detail.
“It’s counterintuitive, but taxpayers spend far more on our system of capital
punishment than we would if the death penalty were not an option. Every study
undertaken in the United States concludes that our death penalty system is far
more costly than a system in which the maximum sentence is life without the
possibility of parole.”
The additional costs accrue through expenditures by county jails and state
prisons and the lengthy appeals process. “The vast majority of those who remain
in prison under a death sentence just die in prison,” Rep. Floyd writes. “We're
spending huge sums of tax dollars on a system of death, but what we are getting
is de facto life without parole.”
These realities of families’ anguish and wasted public resources provide strong
arguments for abolishing the death penalty — an action that 19 states and the
District of Columbia have taken through the years. Nebraska is the most recent,
its legislature voting for abolition in May 2015.
Opposition to the death penalty also is a point of agreement among people with
different, and often contradictory, political points of view on other matters. Marc
Hyden of the national group Conservatives Concerned about the Death Penalty,
shares information in an accompanying article about the recent inaugural
meeting of that organization in northern Kentucky.
“For pro-life conservatives who subscribe to the notion that the government
shouldn't wrongly execute Americans and innocent lives should be safeguarded,
the death penalty has become an untenable program. ...Kentucky’s own track
record is tainted by mistakes. ...The death penalty in Kentucky and elsewhere
poses an undeniable hazard to innocent life.”
Finally, on a personal note, my opposition to the death penalty developed as a
result of my role in administering it five times. At the time, | was director of the
Georgia Department of Corrections, overseeing the executions in the maximum
security prison where | had previously served as warden.
| oppose the death penalty for the reasons articulated by my fellow writers and
because | believe it is illogical for the state to teach citizens not to kill by killing. |
also am acutely aware of the heavy toll capital punishment exacts from the
individuals who have to carry out the sanction. As | have written before,
corrections officials are expected to commit the most premeditated murder
imaginable.
Unjust. Unfair. Costly. Dehumanizing. Kentucky must not wait any longer to
join 19 other states and abolish the death penalty.
Allen Ault recently retired as Dean of the College of Justice & Safety at Eastern
Kentucky University. During his career, he served as Director of Corrections for
five Governors in three states.
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