On July 1st, Kansas entered its twenty ninth year of a capital punishment law on the books again.
Passed by the legislature and allowed by Governor Joan Finney to become law without her signature, the bill was accompanied by many hopes and promises of its supporters. “We’ll get it right and not be like those other states.” “We’ll fund the public defense system.” And, the one that still gets repeated from time to time “This is reserved for the ‘worst of the worst’.”
There are a good number of Kansans who remember the reinstatement fight of 1994 and who tried to warn legislators and Governor Finney that they were buying a failed government program. As we all know, the law went forward and has been impacting Kansans for nearly 30 years now.
So what has Kansas gotten for all these years of the death penalty? We’ll start with numbers this month. In later months, we’ll look at what it how it has played out compared to the hopes and promises of its supporters.
By the numbers in terms of death sentences:
- The first death sentence was handed down in Crawford County in 1997.
- The most recent death sentence came in a Franklin County case in 2016.
- Fifteen death sentences have been handed down. They came from Sedgwick (6), Johnson (2), and one each from Barton, Cowley, Crawford, Franklin, Greenwood, Osage and Shawnee.
- Four of the death sentenced persons have been re-sentenced to alternative lengthy incarceration during their appeal process. Three were Sedgwick County cases and the other was from Shawnee County.
- Two inmates sentenced to death died while in prison custody. One was from Sedgwick County and the other was Johnson County.
- Thus, nine men remain under sentence of death in Kansas as of July 1, 2023.
What can’t be captured by the numbers is the haunting reality of all the pain that is represented in the capital cases—both those where the state sought death and those where they did not. Each case started when one or more persons were killed—leaving behind loved ones and a local community impacted by their deaths.
That pain and the questions of how we provide for public safety and services for victims are ones that Kansas must confront as well as we approach thirty years of capital punishment. Stay tuned!