“There are too many flaws in the system. And when the ultimate decision is death, there is too much at stake to accept an imperfect system,” he said, while ensuring that Yates and his fellow death row inmates will hardly ever see the outside of the Washington State Penitentiary. “I don’t question their guilt or the gravity of their crimes. They get no mercy from me.”

With the moratorium, Washington joins six other states where the death penalty is on hold. Nationwide, there are 18 states where capital punishment has been abolished. But The Evergreen State’s move to take a step back from the death penalty and weigh its pros and cons also comes at a time when several other states are doing the opposite — going to great lengths to secure untested drugs to carry out lethal injections after the primary supplier, a Danish company, banned American prisons from acquiring the preeminent drug used in U.S. executions.

Though Inslee’s plan was met with the expected mixed reviews — a victory by those against the death penalty and as a gratuitous misstep in the eyes of those who defend it — Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said decisions like Inslee’s are in line with national and global trends on the death penalty.

“It’s sort of withering. The less it is used, the less sense it makes,” Dieter said, pointing to research that murder rates are actually consistently decreasing in non–death penalty states. “There are very serious crimes being committed and very dangerous people out there. But the numbers of those far exceeds what we use the death penalty for.”

Even some of the United States’ most heinous criminals — including Washington’s “Green River Killer,” Gary Ridgway, who pleaded guilty to killing 48 people — are not being executed.

“[Those people] don’t get the death penalty,” Dieter said. “The death penalty is more of a symbol.”