Death Penalty Update May 7, 2017

By Dave Levine

There are 32 states where the death penalty is the law. However, 4 of these states’ left-wing Governors have slapped a moratorium on capital punishment, so in reality, just 28 states have the death penalty and only a portion of those are “active” in executions (led by Texas). Those 4 “moratorium states” are CO, OR, PA and WA.

On the positive side for pro-death penalty folks, California voters passed Prop 66 last year which will hopefully speed up executions and streamline the capital punishment system there. The measure was strongly supported by law enforcement there. Nebraskan voters threw out the RINO Senate’s recent ban on executions, reinstating the death penalty. Death Penalty ProCon says Oklahomans voted to make it more difficult to halt executions in the Sooner state. Mostly because of well-publicized murders, 2016 was a good year for the death penalty–certainly better than 2015!

The 32 states that have the death penalty are the following (with “the moratorium states” in bold blue): Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington and Wyoming.

The 18 states that have abolished the death penalty are: Alaska, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, West Virginia and Wisconsin.

Needlesstosay, there is very little discussion about capital punishment in the MSM nor is it found in the Conservative alternative media. I’ve found very few Conservatives ever mentioning the subject. This could be due to the left vilifying many of us who are pushing for it or because many folks are simply non-confrontational and know that leftists are very much “confrontational” on these subjects.

More Conservatives need to get involved in the death penalty debate!

Here’s what I wrote in Comments on a death penalty thread today:

I didn’t believe that most Conservatives oppose capital punishment! While some may be considering getting off the pro-death penalty bandwagon due to the Oklahoma execution that has been referred to as “botched” by the MSM, the truth is that scumbag died and there’s no way to know whether he was in pain after the drug was administered. And even if the dead could speak and tell us they were “in pain”, could we believe them–convicted murderers?

The left is desperately trying to knock more states into either a moratorium (as has been done by 4 left-wing Governors in CO, OR, PA and WA) due to problems with the lethal cocktail drugs or into an outright ban as in the case of 18 states. 32 states still have it on the books but only Texas and Arkansas are “active”.

Because of the problems associated with lethal injection in the 28 states where it’s “the law” and where there are no moratoriums (unavailability of drugs, different reactions to those drugs), two states have brought in firing squads as a method of execution. Others are considering nitrogen hypoxia as a painless method.

For my money, nitrogen hypoxia is the most interesting of the alternative methods as nitrogen is easy to get and cheap and states don’t have to worry about dealing with foreign countries who oppose the death penalty where the drug manufacturers are located.

Kudos to Oklahomans and Nebraskans who last year either made it more difficult to stop executions or who voted the death penalty back in after the RINOs in their legislature voted to end it! Kudos also to California voters who passed Prop 66 with 50.9% of the vote!