Why Pennsylvania governor’s call to end state’s death penalty may be a game changer

On Feb. 16, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro announced that he would ask the state legislature to abolish capital punishment. If it follows his recommendation, Pennsylvania would become the 12th state to end the death penalty since 2007 and the 24^th overall to do so.

Gov. Shapiro, who was elected in November after serving six years as Attorney General, went to a Philadelphia church to announce his decision to an audience of community leaders and advocates for criminal justice reform.

He promised not to sign any execution warrants as governor and to grant a reprieve to any inmate whose execution already is scheduled. He intends to continue the death penalty moratorium that former Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf (D) imposed when he took office in 2015.

Still, Gov. Shapiro’s decision represents a dramatic change for Pennsylvania. Throughout most of its history, the state was a national leader in death sentences and executions; the vast majority of its recent capital prosecutions have come from Philadelphia.

The state’s first execution dates back to the 1693 when Derek Jonson was hanged for murder. From then until 1976, Pennsylvania executed a total of 1,040 people, the third-highest total, behind Virginia and New York.

However, since 1976 only three people have been put to death in Pennsylvania. The last of them, Gary Heidnik, was executed in 1999 for murder, kidnapping and rape in the slaying of two women and the imprisonment of four others in his basement. 

Today Pennsylvania’s Department of Corrections lists 101 people on its death row, making it among the largest in the country.

While it is clear that Pennsylvania is no longer one of this country’s most active death penalty states, Gov. Shapiro’s decision to push for capital punishment’s abolition is of enormous significance.

Here’s why:

First, the 11 states that ended the death penalty in the last 16 years have almost all been deep blue states that regularly support Democrats for state and national offices. The exceptions would seem to be New Hampshire and Virginia. But even in those states, the blue trend is clear. New Hampshire has voted for the Democratic nominee for president in every election since 1992, with the exception on 2000, and Virginia has done so in the last four presidential elections.

Pennsylvania was also a reliably Democratic state — on the national ballot — until 2016 when it gave its presidential vote to Donald Trump. But Pennsylvania has divided government: While the Democratic Party controls the governor’s office, it only recently gained control of the state house of representatives, and by a very narrow margin. Republicans maintain a long-standing majority in the state senate and occupy the offices of attorney general, auditor general and treasurer. This division is also reflected in Congress, where there are nine Democrats and eight Republicans in Pennsylvania’s delegation to the House of Representatives. In 2022 the state had one of this country’s most closely watched campaigns for the U.S Senate between Republican Mehmet Oz and Democrat John Fetterman. 

Pennsylvania has become what political scientist Daniel Hopkins calls the “perennial battleground state.” It’s a central place to understand U.S. politics, Hopkins contends, because “the main currents in the nation are present here.”

In this context, Gov, Shapiro’s announcement is a strong signal that it is safe for to officials in other battleground states and in neighboring states like Ohio to oppose the death penalty.

Across the country, as a report in Vox notes, the political climate for abolitionists has changed so much that Republican legislators are leading efforts to repeal or limit the death penalty in places like Kentucky, Georgia, Missouri and Kansas. And, while crime was a prominent issue during the 2022 midterm election campaign, we heard surprisingly little about the death penalty. 

Gov. Shapiro also signaled a change in the tenor of the arguments against the death penalty, arguments that are generally aimed at heading off opponents and which I have dubbed “the new abolitionism.” Recently, they have focused — with considerable success — on problems of unfairness and unreliability in the way capital punishment is administered rather than the immorality of the death penalty. Abolitionists have highlighted the troubling frequency of false convictions or the pervasiveness of racial discrimination as reasons to end capital punishment.

The fruits of this shift are evident.

Take Illinois, where, in 2011, Governor Pat Quinn signed the bill that abolished his state’s death penalty. On that occasion, as National Public Radio reported, he explained that he had “studied every aspect of Illinois’ death penalty and concluded that it was impossible to create a perfect system, ‘one that is free of all mistakes, free of all discrimination with respect to race or economic circumstance or geography.’” Two years ago, Virginia’s Gov. Ralph Northam struck similar notes when he signed its abolition hill. “We can’t give out the ultimate punishment,” he said, “without being 100 percent sure that we’re right. And we can’t sentence people to that ultimate punishment knowing that the system doesn’t work the same for everyone.”

When former Gov. Wolf first announced his moratorium, he called the state’s death penalty system “error-prone, expensive and anything but infallible.” Like many of death penalty opponents, he said he was acting because of “the risk of executing the innocent.”

Gov. Shapiro distanced himself from those very real and disturbing problems.

“Before we begin,” he told his audience, “let me be absolutely clear on one point — this is not a statement on the integrity of individual capital convictions in Pennsylvania … The people on death row in our Commonwealth … deserve to be put behind bars for a good long time, if not for life.”

The governor said that focusing on the “idea that our capital sentencing system is flawed … misses the mark.” The more important question, he claimed, is whether death is ever a “just and appropriate punishment for the state to inflict on its citizens.”

His answer was a flat ‘No.’

As Shapiro put it, “The Commonwealth shouldn’t be in the business of putting people to death. Period. This,” he said, “is a fundamental statement of morality. Of what’s right and wrong.”

He called on the legislature to put Pennsylvania “on the right side of this issue.”

Gov. Shapiro’s explanation of his own reasons for wanting to end the death penalty is a challenge to abolitionists to alter the way they talk about capital punishment. He would appear to be calling on them to be as clear about their concern for the fate of the guilty as they have been about the fate of those falsely convicted of capital crimes.

We should heed his call. What Shapiro said about Pennsylvania is true everywhere: Ending the death penalty is about right and wrong. It is time for the entire country to get “on the right side of this issue.”

NOTE: This post has been updated to clarify the section on Pennsylvania’s divided government with the addition of elected row offices of auditor general and treasurer; the original, while accurate, may have implied the office of secretary of state is elected — it’s not.

Austin Sarat (@ljstprof) is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. He is author of numerous books on America’s death penalty, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty and  Lethal Injection and the False Promise of Humane Execution. The views expressed here do not represent Amherst College.