When Americans talk about the death penalty in the United States, we generally ignore a large swath of the middle of the country. In part, that is because only 200 of the 1594 executions that have taken place since 1976 occurred in the Midwest.
However, looking at such reliably red states like Kansas, Nebraska, and Wyoming offers a window into the ferment about capital punishment that is occurring elsewhere . In those three states, each of which retains the death penalty as an authorized punishment, both the usual suspects and some unusual voices are now raising serious questions about whether they should continue to do so.
That kind of strange bed-fellows alliance was on display last week when Carolyn McGinn, a Republican state representative from Wichita, Kansas, and Kelson Bohnet, a capital trial lawyer in the Kansas public defender system and a member of the state’s coalition against the death penalty, published an op-ed in the Kansas City Star.
This political odd couple wrote that it was time for Kansans to bury state killing.
The Kansas death penalty that they want to end once featured prominently in the public’s imagination. Truman Capote’s best-selling non-fiction novel, In Cold Blood, told the story of Richard Hickok and Perry Smith, who murdered four people and were executed by hanging in April of 1965.
But since then, Kansas has not executed anyone.
In fact, as McGinn and Bohnet explain, “Only 15 people here have been sentenced to death since 1994, and there have been no new death sentences at all since 2016.” Today, Kansas has 9 people on death row.
The state has a complicated death penalty history. According to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC), “The Kansas death penalty has been abolished and reinstated three times.”
It was first abolished over a century ago, on January 30, 1907. Every year, The Kansas Coalition Against The Death Penaltydesignates January 30 as “Abolition Day.”
“In 1935,” the DPIC notes, “the death penalty was reinstated, but no executions took place under the law until 1944. Kansas had this death penalty statute in effect until the 1972 US Supreme Court ruling that struck down the death penalty.” After Gregg v. Georgia brought the death penalty back to America, “the Kansas legislature made numerous attempts to reinstate the death penalty…. [The governor] vetoed reinstatement legislation in 1979, 1980, 1981, and 1985. The current death penalty statute was enacted in 1994.”
And just over a decade ago, the Kansas senate came within one vote of supporting ending the death penalty.
Like Kansas, Nebraska has had its own complicated death penalty history. In 2015, the state legislature repealed that punishment, but voters reinstated it in 2016.
Other states have done similar things in the past, with Arizona and Oregon both abolishing and reinstating the death penalty by popular vote.
Arizona abolished the death penalty in 1916 and reinstated it in 1918, while Oregon has followed this pattern twice. It first got rid of capital punishment in 1914 before bringing it back in 1920 and then abolishing it again in 1964 and reinstating it in 1978.
Nebraska has executed four people since 1976, the last being Carey Dean Moore in 2018 for killing two cab drivers in Omaha in 1979. Currently, Nebraska has no executions scheduled, though its legislature is considering alternatives to lethal injection, such as nitrogen hypoxia.
Last spring, the Nebraska Legislature’s Judiciary Committee voted 3-4, with one senator present and not voting, against putting a proposed constitutional amendment to end the death penalty on the ballot in November.
Supporters of the amendment told the committee that the death penalty is inhumane, is disproportionately applied to people of color, and does not deter crime. They urged the committee to make sure that no one could be put to death in Nebraska for a murder they didn’t commit.
Today, 11 men are on death row in Nebraska.
The situation of the death penalty in Wyoming looks more like Kansas than Nebraska. Wyoming carried out its first execution in 1871, a public hanging.
Before it became a state in 1890, seven people were executed in Wyoming. And between 1890 and 1972, the state carried out 18 executions.
In the last half-century, Wyoming has only carried out one execution. That was in 1992 when the state put Mark Hopkinson to death for ordering the murder of four people decades earlier.
No one has been on its death row for a decade.
In 2019, in a move foreshadowing last week’s development in Kansas, two Republican legislators introduced a bill to repeal Wyoming’s death penalty and replace it with life without parole or life imprisonment. Democrats in both chambers of the state legislature quickly joined them.
This bipartisan group focused on the cost of bringing capital cases and the fact that, as one of the sponsors said, “the availability of a life without parole sentence adequately balances the need to protect public safety while recognizing the need to reduce the strain on taxpayer resources.”
A year later, in 2020, Governor Mark Gordon said he was seriously considering imposing a moratorium on the state’s death penalty. He also cited the costs of capital cases as his reason for doing so.
“It costs us around a million dollars every time that is brought up,” Gordon said. “These are just luxuries—luxuries, that we will no longer be able to afford.” In 2021, a Wyoming senate committee advanced a bill to repeal the state’s death penalty to the full senate, but it died there.
This brings us back to what McGinn and Bohnet said last week. Like the arguments made in other heartland states, they called capital punishment a “failed big government program.”
They started their argument with a thought experiment. “Imagine,” McGinn and Bohnet wrote, “those 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, they explained, “is the very true story of Kansas’ death penalty.”
McGinn and Bohnet noted that in addition to its exorbitant costs, “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.” They added, “As long as we have the death penalty, we risk the irreparable harm of executing an innocent person…. The moral harm that Kansans would suffer from a wrongful execution cannot be understated.”
McGinn and Bohnet ended by claiming, “A bipartisan legislative majority, along with Gov. Laura Kelly, is primed and ready to end this failed government program.” They urged the state house and senate leadership to “be brave enough to allow death penalty repeal to get a hearing and vote.”
It may be that bravery is needed, or maybe careful attention to the facts about capital punishment will be sufficient to motivate action to end it in Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, and elsewhere across America’s heartland. Whatever it is, the substance of McGinn and Bohnet’s op-ed as well as who they are, signals the rising discontent in Kansas that has elsewhere precipitated the abolition of capital punishment.
In the end, while the fate of capital punishment in this country will depend more on what happens in places like Alabama, Florida, Oklahoma, and Texas, what is unfolding in the heartland may ultimately play a big role in toppling the dominos that lead to the death penalty’s fall all across the country.
