Imagine that well-meaning politicians created a government program that was supposed to help people.
Now, imagine that same program getting 30 years of tax dollars and helping precisely nobody.
Worse yet, imagine that the program’s mere existence actually hurts people in ways that no one originally considered.
That story is real, and it’s not the story of a progressive social experiment. Instead, this is the very true story of Kansas’ death penalty.
July 1 marked the 30th anniversary of the state’s modern era of capital punishment.
Now, with three decades come and gone, it’s past time for Kansans to do an honest assessment of what capital punishment has and hasn’t brought to our state.
Many don’t even know that Kansas has the death penalty, and that’s because it has been more of an empty promise than actual reality for years. Only 15 people here have been sentenced to death since 1994, and there have been no new death sentences at all since 2016.
In some of those cases, the courts have only just completed the first set of state appeals. No cases whatsoever have finished state review and moved into federal court. Instead of being executed, these condemned men are seeing their sentences reversed or are dying of old age in prison.
Looking forward, lethal injection drugs will be extraordinarily hard, if not impossible to obtain because of pharmaceutical companies’ reluctance.
Kansas also hasn’t seen positive results from having the death penalty on the books.
The public at large hasn’t benefited. Studies examining Kansas homicides have found no evidence that the death penalty deters murder.
Society is no safer under these death sentences than with sentences of life without parole.
Victims’ families have also not benefited. Instead of the closure available through a speedy trial, appeal and life sentence with no release, these families still face decades of appeals and legal challenges that are unique to death sentences.
Not only have the death penalty’s supposed benefits never materialized, but its harms are very real.
Kansas’ public defender agency spends more than 12% of its budget on capital cases, but those cases account for less than 0.1% of the system’s caseload.
