Legislation could end Pennsylvania’s expensive and unreliable capital punishment system

A version of the following public comment was submitted to the Pennsylvania House Judiciary Committee on April 27, 2026.

The legislation straightforwardly repeals capital punishment from Pennsylvania statutes, replacing the maximum sentence for relevant offenses to life imprisonment.

Wrongful convictions become irreversible after an individual is executed by the state

Since 1995, Pennsylvania has exonerated 13 individuals from death row. The average Pennsylvania exoneree spent more than 16 years wrongly sentenced to death, and the longest wait for exoneration was 29 years. Twelve of those 13 exonerations involved official misconduct, 11 involved perjury or false accusations, and seven involved inadequate legal representation.

Wrongful convictions are of particular concern given Pennsylvania's track record on indigent defense. Prior to 2023, Pennsylvania was one of only two states in the country that did not provide state funding for indigent defense, leaving public defender services to be funded entirely at the county level. State funding for indigent defense now exists, but that reform is only three years old and does not inspire confidence that the quality of capital representation in the commonwealth has been materially strengthened. A 2019 review by the Philadelphia District Attorney's Office of every Philadelphia death sentence imposed between 1978 and 2017 found that 72 percent of those sentences were ultimately overturned, with ineffective assistance of counsel cited in the majority of reversals.

The death penalty has no established deterrent benefit beyond the incapacitation achieved by long-term imprisonment

A 2012 report of the National Research Council of the National Academies, which reviewed more than three decades of deterrence studies, concluded that the existing research "is not informative about whether capital punishment decreases, increases, or has no effect on homicide rates." The council recommended that such studies not be used to inform policy judgments. More recent studies have not provided sufficient clarity to update this conclusion.

Capital punishment and incarceration achieve the same incapacitation goals by removing dangerous individuals from the community. Absent credible evidence on deterrence, there is little reason to believe capital punishment has public safety benefits beyond those that are achieved by lengthy incarcerations. An individual who is undeterred by the prospect of a life sentence is unlikely to be deterred by the prospect of execution.

Capital cases cost substantially more than cases in which life without parole is the maximum sentence

Every state to have examined the question carefully has found the cost of capital cases to exceed that of non-capital alternatives. Many of the causes of higher costs in capital cases are constitutional in nature and therefore not susceptible to legislative reform.

Pennsylvania has not commissioned a rigorous fiscal study, but the commonwealth currently sustains many costs of capital punishment while it is not being imposed in practice. Pennsylvania has not conducted an execution since 1999, and an official gubernatorial moratorium on executions has been in place since 2015. The Joint State Government Commission has further documented that more than 97 percent of post-conviction reversals of Pennsylvania death sentences imposed under the 1978 capital statute have resulted in a sentence of life imprisonment or less.

In practice, the commonwealth is incurring the litigation and custodial costs of a capital system whose sentences are almost uniformly converted to life imprisonment on review. Any additional resources the commonwealth is dedicating to capital cases relative to non-capital cases could be more effectively allocated toward other objectives.