Washington state’s Supreme Court unanimously ruled the death penalty unconstitutional on Thursday, HuffPost reports.
The decision comes on the 16th World Day Against the Death Penalty, organized by the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty. The group’s website says it “aims at raising awareness on the inhumane living conditions of people sentenced to death.”
The court, which declared capital punishment “arbitrary and racially biased,” was prompted by one of the inmates currently on death row, Allen Eugene Gregory. NPR reports that Gregory was found guilty of murder in 1996, but he argued that the death penalty is “unequally applied” in Washington.
Gregory commissioned a study that found “black defendants were four and a half times more likely to be sentenced to death than similarly situated white defendants,” NPR adds.
Yesterday, the Washington State Supreme Court unanimously struck down the death penalty as unconstitutional.
Racial bias is the intractable legacy of the death penalty’s history in America. We won’t stop fighting until it’s illegal everywhere. pic.twitter.com/3lJdV4NmbW
— ACLU (@ACLU) October 12, 2018
This inequality is corroborated by a 2014 study by University of Washington professor Katherine Beckett, which found that black defendants in Washington state were three times likelier to be sentenced to death than their white counterparts.
The Death Penalty Information Center adds that 76% of murder victims in cases that result in the death penalty are white, despite the fact that only 50% of murder victims nationally are white.
Washington is now the 20th state to abolish the death penalty, while three other states have governor-imposed moratoria on the punishment.
The decision is, of course, controversial. In June of this year, the Pew Research Center reported that 54 percent of people surveyed supported the death penalty, up from a four-decade low of 49 percent in 2016. 39 percent of respondents in the 2018 survey were opposed.
The Center adds that capital punishment remains a strongly partisan issue, with 77 percent of Republicans in support of it, compared to only 35 percent of Democrats. Until this shifts from a political, “us versus them” issue to one of humanity and empathy, the 30 states that have yet to outlaw the practice may find themselves in impossible stalemates.