I recently spoke at the Oklahoma Republican Liberty Caucus where I presented the conservative case against the death penalty. Death row exonerees, Kwame Ajamu and Randy Steidl, also spoke at the event.
The Edmond Sun’s James Coburn covered the event and wrote,
Logan County Commissioner Marven Goodman is chairman of the group and said the group represents a group of disenfranchised conservatives who are not satisfied with the direction many conservatives have taken in state government.
Goodman said he does not place much trust in government regulations. So he questioned why he should trust the government to execute people.
Coburn said,
Oklahoma has wrongly convicted 10 death penalty survivors since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, said Marc Hyden, advocacy coordinator for Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty. The group is a project of Equal Justice USA.
Oklahoma has among the highest per-capita death penalty rates in the nation with 112 executions since 1976, he said.
“We don’t know how many innocent people might have been executed because there is no method in the criminal justice system to go back and try them,” Hyden said.
A 2015 Sooner Poll revealed 53 percent of Oklahomans support abolishing capital punishment and replacing it with a sentence of life without parole, plus restitution to victims’ families.
Coburn continued,
“This is a government that makes many mistakes,” Hyden said.
As a fiscal conservative he cannot abide with the expense of the death penalty for the state during trials and the appeals process. Death row is about twice as expensive for housing prisoners as housing in a maximum security prison, Hyden said. It costs $2 million more than the life cycle of an inmate sentenced to life without parole, he explained.
