This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

In the exhibition hall at the conservative grassroot’s annual lovefest, CPAC, the usual range of freedom-touting, gun-toting, climate change-denying, liberal-bashing views were on display.

Democratic oversight is 'bullshit': Trump goes off-script at CPAC Read more

The National Rifle Association loomed large, as did stalls promoting hunting and fishing, biblical fundamentalism and, quizzically, “domestic uranium”. On Saturday, Donald Trump showed up to deliver perhaps his most extreme speech yet, a freewheeling, two-hour, avowedly off-script hard-right screed.

But one exhibition booth at the CPAC hub in National Harbor, Maryland, had a far less predictable message. A large banner over the stall proclaimed: “Questioning a broken system marked by inefficiency, inequity and inaccuracy.”

The “broken system” being denounced was not socialism, gun control or the other targets modern Republicans love to hate. It was the death penalty.

The booth was covered in posters opposing capital punishment in the words of prominent Republicans. Jay Sekulow, Donald Trump’s lawyer on the Russia collusion inquiry, was quoted in big letters: “Conservatives should question how the death penalty actually works in order to stay true to small government.”

The group behind it was Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty (CCATDP), a national network challenging the practice on traditional rightwing grounds. In a country that has grown used to hearing Republicans adopt hardline hang-’em-and-flog-’em postures, CCATDP’s line sounds as counterintuitive as turkeys campaigning for Christmas.

The group is led by Hannah Cox, a conservative from Tennessee who has worked at a free-market thinktank and on a pro-gun campaign. A dutiful southerner, Cox began life as an adamant cheerleader for capital punishment.

“I have a Republican and Southern Baptist background and everyone I know supported the death penalty,” she said.

Her views changed after she began probing the reality in America. “The truth was, my belief in capital punishment was a gut reaction based on no knowledge. When I looked at it I discovered the system was shockingly different from what I had imagined.”

Cox rattled off a list of arguments that turned her from devout supporter to devout opponent:

Innocence. “The number of innocent people on death row is what caught my attention first, and still worries me the most,” she said.

Cost. Numerous studies have shown that the average expense of a capital case from trial through to the death chamber is vastly greater than the cost of imprisoning someone for life. A 2017 review in Oklahoma found that capital cases are more than three times more expensive than non-capital equivalents.

Big government. As a conservative committed to reining back the state, Cox now sees capital punishment as being “as big as big government gets – and like all government it frequently makes mistakes”.

CCATDP was formed seven years ago. It has been plugging away ever since, but Cox is now convinced the mood is turning slowly but definitively in their favor.

“We’re seeing a grassroots shift among conservatives, with more and more people coming round to the idea that the system isn’t working,” she said.

Thirty states still nominally practice capital punishment in America. But that is misleading given its general withering away.

In 2018 there were 25 executions in the US, the fourth year in a row where the number has dropped below 30. In 1996, at its peak, there were 315 judicial killings.

Within that nationwide decline, the number of active death penalty states has also waned. Last year only eight states put a prisoner to death, and of those just one, Texas, stood out with 13 executions.

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CCATDP’s significance within the overall picture of capital punishment in America is underlined by the fact that of the eight states that last year carried out executions – Texas and then Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Nebraska, Ohio, South Dakota and Tennessee – are all controlled by Republicans.

Yet the data suggests even conservative thinking is on the move. A study carried out by CCATDP last year found that the number of Republican sponsors of state bills repealing the death penalty has soared since 2009, from two to 40 in 2016. In the first few weeks of 2019, Republicans in seven states have sponsored repeal bills.

Take Missouri. Its Republican leadership has been relatively gung-ho about judicial killings in recent years, until a European boycott of lethal injection drugs intervened and forced a virtual moratorium.

But Republican opposition is growing. State senator Paul Wieland has pressed repeal bills for the past six years. In 2016 he had a breakthrough when his bill reached the senate floor; it never made a vote, but even the debate marked a seismic shift.

Like Cox, Wieland set out in politics as an advocate of the death penalty. “I thought, yeah, these people need to pay for their crime. But when I started looking into it, it didn’t take me long to change.”

First, he asked himself how there could be any deterrent value when it took 20 or 30 years to complete the appeals cycle and actually execute someone. Then he moved on to more moral issues, such as whether the state can be trusted not to kill an innocent person. As a pro-life Catholic who opposes abortion, he began to wonder how he could be anything but pro-life for adults too.

New Hampshire has come within a hair’s breadth of abolishing the practice. There hasn’t been an execution in the state since 1939, and there’s only one man currently on death row. Last year a repeal bill passed both chambers, then under Republican control, but was vetoed by the Republican governor, Chris Sununu.

State senator Bob Guida, a co-sponsor of successive repeal bills, comes from classic conservative stock. A staunch gun advocate, he was in the US marines before becoming a special agent in the FBI.

He too began life as a champion of capital punishment. “That was the norm among my FBI colleagues, and I’m sure it still is. I’ve seen some heinous and horrific things. But I’ve come to recognise that we don’t have a perfect system – it’s better to let 10 guilty men go free than put one innocent person to death.”

Cox is convinced that with attitudes like Guida’s spreading, the end is in sight. “I encourage people to get back to the fundamental principles of small government, low taxes, sanctity of human life. These are the true conservative values – so why not use them?”