Utah has an opportunity to make history. Republican lawmakers have introduced a bill to repeal the state’s death penalty. It has already received widespread support from fellow conservatives, four sitting prosecutors, families of victims, and business leaders.
Backing from this group of unlikely allies underscores what’s become abundantly clear: Utah’s death penalty is cruel, ineffective, racist, and alarmingly error-prone — and it must go.
I first grappled with capital punishment as a high-schooler in Oklahoma City, after a childhood acquaintance, Julius Jones, was sentenced to die. While Julius wasn’t my closest friend, we shared the court for years — playing together in the city’s AAU basketball circuit.
His conviction seemed problematic from the outset: a single eyewitness who identified a different culprit, a nearly all-white jury, a district attorney with a history of misconduct — the list goes on. However, I now know that his case — riddled with error, racism, bias and wrongful conviction — is far from exceptional. Julius’ story is one that is repeated across the country, including right here in Utah. It highlights the glaring flaws that define our capital punishment system and why we must get rid of it forever.
For something with such irrevocable consequences, it is shockingly error-prone. For every eight people executed in the United States, one innocent person has been exonerated. In Utah, DNA evidence proved the innocence of Bruce Goodman in 2004, after he wasted over 18 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit. While the death penalty continues to exist, there will always be a very real risk of killing innocent people like Julius.
Capital punishment is a descendent of lynching, and a link to our country’s shameful past. A Black defendant is four times more likely to receive a death sentence than a white one for an equivalent crime. It should then be no surprise that while Black people make up only 14% of the U.S. population, they make up 55% of our death row population.
The past two years have seen a reckoning for racial injustice in America and I’m proud that the Jazz, as well as teams across the NBA, stood up and spoke out. By ridding ourselves of this symbol of racial oppression we can strike a massive blow in that fight.
Families of victims are also speaking out against the death penalty. With never-ending appeals that can span decades, these families are forced to relive their trauma repeatedly. Sharon Wright Weeks, whose sister and niece were murdered in Utah in 1984, was tormented by a process that lasted 35 years. She has since joined the growing chorus of the voices calling for abolition. We need a justice system that helps make victims whole again — not one that brings further suffering.
It costs a fortune, and it doesn’t make us safer. In Utah, taxpayers have spent $40 million over the past 20 years. For all that money, it remains completely ineffective as a deterrent. States with the death penalty have higher murder rates than those without. Now more than ever, we need justice measures that work— capital punishment isn’t one.
It’s increasingly unpopular. More than half of Americans support alternative punishments for murder, and states as diverse as Virginia, Colorado, and New Hampshire have abolished it in the past two years alone. In Utah, a recent poll found that support for the death penalty is fading fast. By maintaining capital punishment, we appear completely out of step with modern values and public opinion.
After years of advocacy and a groundswell of support this fall, Gov. Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma commuted Julius Jones’s death sentence hours before his scheduled execution. But unless we dismantle this machinery of death, there will be others who won’t be saved. They will be killed in our name, many of them innocent, guilty of nothing but the color of their skin. This should be abhorrent to anyone with a shred of human decency. We all have a duty to fight for a fairer society. We should start by calling for an end to Utah’s death penalty.
(Eric Walden | The Salt Lake Tribune) Utah Jazz assistant coach Irv Roland shows off his "Justice for Julius" wristband, just days ahead of the death row convict's scheduled execution in Oklahoma.
Irv Roland is an assistant coach for the Utah Jazz.