The governor of Pennsylvania has announced a moratorium on executions in the state, citing “significant and widely recognized defects” of the capital punishment system.

Governor Tom Wolf’s order on Friday granted a temporary reprieve in the case of Terrence Williams, who was scheduled to die 4 March for a 1986 murder. Wolf said he would grant further reprieves for all death row inmates until he had the results of a task force that has since 2011 been investigating the fairness and cost of capital punishment in the state.

“Despite having the fifth largest death row in the nation, the death penalty has rarely been imposed in modern times,” Wolf wrote. There are currently 186 death row inmates in Pennsylvania.

The last execution in Pennsylvania was carried out more than 15 years ago, though death row inmates have routinely had execution dates set before seeing them stayed. In the last 40 years, Wolf wrote, only three of the 434 death warrants signed by Pennsylvania governors have been carried out.

“This unending cycle of death warrants and appeals diverts resources from the judicial system and forces the families and loved ones of victims to relive their tragedies each time a new round of warrants and appeals commences,” Wolf said. “The only certainty in the current system is that the process will be drawn out, expensive, and painful for all involved.”



In September, the Guardian joined the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Philadelphia City Paper in a lawsuit over the state’s secrecy about the source of its lethal injection drugs. Similar lawsuits have been filed in Arizona, Missouri and Oklahoma.