Trevor Schakohl
PHILADELPHIA, PA – Murder suspects facing trial in Pennsylvania can breathe a sigh of relief after the Governor announced he will ban executions going forward.
Governor Josh Shapiro announced that he would not issue any execution warrants during his term. He called on the General Assembly to join nearly half of the country in abolishing the death penalty for good.
“Today I speak not to the integrity individual capital convictions, but to the question of whether death is a just and appropriate punishment for the state to inflict on its citizens,” Shapiro told a room full of supporters. “
For more than a decade, including when I assumed office as Attorney General, I believed that the death penalty should be reserved for the most heinous crimes – but that it was, indeed, a just punishment for those crimes. However, when the first capital cases came to my desk in the AG’s office, I found myself repeatedly unwilling to seek the death penalty.”
Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro is urging legislators to spare those on Pennsylvania’s death row from execution, including those who murdered police officers and children.
According to Pennsylvania law, an execution warrant must be signed by the governor before an inmate may be executed, but Shapiro, along with Democratic State Sen. Nikil Saval, Vince Hughes and Rep. Rick Krajewski, said Thursday he would not issue such warrants during his term and urged the General Assembly to abolish capital punishment entirely. There are currently over 100 men in Pennsylvania awaiting death sentence, some of whom have killed police officers and children.
“At a time when Pennsylvanians are concerned about their personal safety and the safety of their families as we deal with a historic spike in violent crime, it is clear now is not the time to stop holding criminals to the highest level of accountability for the most heinous crimes,” Pennsylvania House Republican Caucus spokesperson Jason Gottesman told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “Removing this measure of accountability and deterrence from prosecutorial discretion is at best tone deaf to the concerns of Pennsylvanians and at worst disrespectful to the victims of the most serious crimes in our society.”
Pennsylvania should do what 25 other states have done in outlawing the death penalty or refusing to impose it – including many of our neighbors such as New Jersey, Maryland, and West Virginia.
Shapiro had advocated for capital punishment abolition during his campaign, and Pennsylvania’s last execution occurred in 1999, according to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star. Previous Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf instituted an execution moratorium in 2015.
A jury sentenced Eric Frein to death after he shot and killed a state police corporal and injured a trooper at the Blooming Grove, Pennsylvania State Police Barracks in September 2014 before being captured that October 30 and was ultimately convicted of charges including terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, according to court records. Frein wrote a letter to his parents prior to arrest talking of revolution and saying, “The time seems right for a spark to ignite a fire in the hearts of men. What I have done has not been done before and it felt like it was worth a try.”
Richard Poplawski received a death sentence for murdering three police officers at his mother’s Pittsburgh home in 2009 after she called the police following an argument in which she threatened to have him removed from the house, court documents show. Poplawski, who was in his early twenties, was taken to the hospital and later told two officers there, “I should have killed more of you.”
Republican Pennsylvania State Rep. Aaron Bernstine told the DCNF he opposes Shapiro’s call to abolish the death penalty in his state.
“I strongly believe that capital punishment should be an option for prosecutors reserved for the most violent offenders, particularly those who have committed crimes against children,” Bernstine argued.
Drug addict Paul Gamboa-Taylor was convicted of murdering two of his own young children, his wife, his mother-in-law and her two-year-old daughter using a hammer in 1991 in York, Pennsylvania, according to legal records. Gamboa-Taylor was sentenced to death the next year.
Harvey Miguel Robinson raped and killed 29-year-old Joan Burghardt, 15-year-old newspaper delivery girl Charlotte Schmoyer and forty-seven year-old Jessica Jean Fortney and raped thirty-eight-year-old Denise Sam-Cali in less than a year from 1992 to 1993, legal documents indicate. Robinson was 18 years old when he attacked the second two victims, based on Pennsylvania Department of Corrections records
A court gave Thavirak Sam three death sentences for the murders of his mother-in-law, brother-in-law and two-year-old niece, according to a court filing. Sam had immigrated to the U.S. from Cambodia.
Shapiro said Thursday his opinion on capital punishment had “evolved” since the 2018 antisemitic mass shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, which killed 11 Jewish people. Alleged perpetrator Robert Bowers has pleaded not guilty to federal charges and could be sentenced to death for those counts, according to WESA, and Shapiro admitted he initially thought capital punishment was deserved in that case.
Abolishing the death penalty in Pennsylvania would permanently spare Richard Scott Baumhammers, who murdered five people, seriously wounded another and vandalized two synagogues by shooting into them and defacing the first with spray paint in 2000, according to court records. Evidence of Baumhammers’ racist and anti-immigrant ideologies was found on his computer and presented at trial.
A jury sentenced Roger Judge to death in June 1987 after murdering two people in Philadelphia, but he escaped from custody two days after sentencing, a court filing says. Judge was arrested in Canada the next year for two Vancouver armed robberies, received concurrent ten-year prison sentences for those crimes and was ultimately deported to the U.S. in 1998.
The oldest-living Pennsylvania inmate formally sentenced to death is George Banks, who murdered 13 people including five of his own young children in September 1982, according to court documents. However, a Luzerne County senior judge 2010 decided in 2010 that Banks was incompetent to be executed “because he has a fixed, false belief, a delusion, that his sentence has been vacated by God, the governor and [former President] George W. Bush. He believes he is in prison illegally, and he should be going home,” The Morning Call reported.
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Editor’s update: Modified to include statements from PA Governor on 3/1/23