Sen. Stephen Urquhart, R-St. George, says capital punishment makes sense in theory, but its true costs are prompting him to question whether the state should continue executing criminals. His Senate Bill 189 would abolish the death penalty for future capital cases.
Jensie Anderson, president of the Rocky Mountain Innocence Project, says 4 percent of those condemned to death are later proven innocent.
“Because the death penalty is the perfect, irrefutable and un-reversible punishment,” she told senators in a Tuesday hearing, “it is indefensible to have it in an imperfect system.”
But death-penalty supporters don’t see any reason for change. One is the director of conservative Utah Eagle Forum, Maryann Christensen.
“When we take the life of a heinous murderer and a repeat offender, it honors the lives of the people whose lives were taken by him,” she said at the hearing.
At least one senator says capital punishment is too emotional to take up so late in the session. But Urquhart insisted Tuesday that the real-world stakes of capital punishment are too high to ignore for victims, the condemned and society as a whole.
“Think about this, the craven insanity of this,” he urged members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. “Here’s a prosecutor, a government employee, who said the inevitability of a mistake should not serve as grounds to eliminate the death penalty. Yes, it should.”
Urquhart’s legislation to end the death penalty in Utah, passed committee, 5 to 2. It’s now on the list of bills to be discussed during the final two weeks of the 2016 legislative session.
