SALT LAKE CITY – While the state Capitol is now humming with discussion and debate about practically anything and everything, the Utah Legislature is nevertheless deathly silent on at least one topic – the death penalty.
“I’ve had continuing conversations with a lobbyist about (the death penalty),” said freshman Sen. Chris Wilson of Logan during a virtual town hall Thursday hosted by Cache Republicans. “He is not pushing the issue of the death penalty at this time. So I don’t think that we’ll see a death penalty bill in this session.
“As I read between the lines, I’m guessing that he just can’t find any support in the Legislature at the present time.”
As recently as the 2020 legislative session, advocacy groups including the Libertas Institute, the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake and the Utah branch of the American Civic Liberties Union (ACLU) attempted to drum up public support for the abolition of Utah’s death penalty. Previous unsuccessful abolition efforts from within the Legislature were launched in 2016 and 2018.
Wilson voiced no interest in abolishing capital punishment in the recent GOP town hall, nor did Rep. Dan Johnson of Logan.
“I’m certainly not one who is going to vote in favor of getting rid of the death penalty,” Johnson said simply.
Neither is Rep. Casey Snider, who spoke vehemently in favor of capital punishment on Thursday.
“I apologize for getting emotional and speaking sort of strongly on this,” Snider said. “But I think that we have to recognize that — much as we would to think that it isn’t so — there are horrible people on this earth and there is but one remedy in my mind that should be applied for the crimes that they commit.”
Although it’s nowhere near the front burner, the death penalty remains a hot topic nationally amid all the ongoing cultural war over alleged institutional racism and social injustice in America. Conservative pundits are predicting that efforts to ban the death penalty will eventually be added to the national agenda of newly-ascendant liberal Democrats.
But attitudes about the death penalty in Utah and the nation differ widely.
Utah is one of 25 states that still have capital punishment on their books. The Beehive State has executed 51 individuals since 1854. The most recent of those was the execution of convicted murderer Randy Gardner by firing squad on June 18, 2010. Utah currently has six inmates pending execution on death row.
U.S. public support for capital punishment has been withering in recent years, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
New Hampshire became the 21st state to legally abolish the death penalty in 2019 and California became the fourth state to place a moratorium on executions. With those actions, the specter of death by lethal injection has been eroded in most parts of the U.S. and completely disappeared in others, especially New England.
National public support for capital punishment also hit a 47-year low in 2019, with 60 percent of Americans reporting that they preferred life imprisonment rather than the death penalty for serious offenses.
In Utah, however, lawmakers favoring the death penalty are bolstered by differing public sentiment.
Here the state Commission on Criminal and Juvenile Justice reports that three surveys by Dan Jones and Associates since 2015 revealed that half to two-thirds of Utahns polled favor capital punishment.
While Utah lawmakers and prosecutors agree that capital punishment should only be imposed as a last resort, they also believe that the threat of the death penalty provides a much-needed bargaining chip for criminal investigators.
“All of us remember what happened to Lizzy Shelley just a couple of years ago,” Snider said, referring to the case of a 5-year-old Logan girl who was kidnapped and murdered by her uncle, Alex Whipple.
“That man did not care for her life one iota,” Snider stressed. “But, when his own life was threatened with the possible application of the death penalty, only then did he tell authorities where he had hidden her body.
“If that threat hadn’t been on the table, there wouldn’t have been enough left of that little girl’s body to even have a funeral.”
Johnson added that recent conversations with Cache County Attorney James Swink have convinced him that prosecutors often regard the threat of the death penalty as a valuable tool when seeking a sense of closure for the families of victims of heinous crimes.
Utah is one of only two states that can still legally perform executions via firing squads in lieu of death by lethal injection.