Death penalty

Is public sentiment changing toward the death penalty?

A Gallup poll last fall found support for the death penalty had hit its lowest point in four decades, at 61 percent. On Wednesday, Connecticut’s governor signed a bill outlawing capital punishment in that state. Californians will vote this fall whether to ban executions and convert the sentences of those on death row to life without parole.

Meanwhile, USA Today reports the National Research Council concluded last week that “there have been no reliable studies to show that capital punishment is a deterrent to homicide.”

Indeed, the death penalty raises serious moral and ethical questions. And those on both sides of the debate hold passionate beliefs. But the issue of deterrence serves as a red herring – as the recent death of a Nevada inmate highlights.

Nevada, along with 31 other states, still has the death penalty. The state has executed a dozen murderers – the last in 2006 – since a 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision lifted a national moratorium. More than seven dozen people remain on the state’s death row.

On Wednesday, 56-year-old Robert Farmer died at Valley Hospital in Las Vegas. He was a prison inmate who had been transferred from Ely State Prison to High Desert State Prison because of an illness. In 1983, he was convicted of first-degree murder, and the following year he pleaded guilty to the same charge for killing a Las Vegas cabdriver.

A three-judge panel sentenced him to death.

But Farmer was never executed. In 2007 – 23 years after his conviction – the Nevada Supreme Court vacated his death sentence on a technicality. Prosecutors sought a new hearing to reinstate the sentence, but Farmer appealed, delaying the matter further. A federal appeals court finally rejected the killer’s arguments, but the new hearing had not yet taken place when he died.

Almost three decades after his original sentence, Robert Farmer was still successfully fighting off the needle.

Arguments for and against capital punishment abound. But it’s important to remember when the discussion turns to deterrence that – as the case of Robert Farmer highlights – even many states that allow executions, don’t really have capital punishment.