VICTORY! Washington State House votes to remove death penalty and Eyman’s two-thirds nonsense from our state’s body of laws

A well-craft­ed house­keep­ing bill that would abol­ish a num­ber of uncon­sti­tu­tion­al statutes has passed out of the Wash­ing­ton State House, mark­ing the first time that both cham­bers of the Leg­is­la­ture have vot­ed to repeal the death penalty.

Sub­sti­tute Sen­ate Bill 5087, prime spon­sored by Sen­a­tor Jamie Ped­er­sen (D‑43rd Dis­trict: Seat­tle) and request­ed by Attor­ney Gen­er­al Bob Fer­gu­son, would for­mal­ly scrub a list of statutes no longer in effect from the Revised Code of Washington.

These statutes include the death penal­ty, deemed uncon­sti­tu­tion­al by the Supreme Court as applied, along with the uncon­sti­tu­tion­al two-thirds scheme to raise rev­enue that Tim Eyman turned into a series of initiatives.

Fifty-eight rep­re­sen­ta­tives said yes to strik­ing these uncon­sti­tu­tion­al statutes from our books, while thir­ty-nine were opposed. The roll call was as follows:

Roll Call
SB 5087
Defects and omissions
Final Pas­sage on Reconsideration
4/7/2023

Yeas: 58; Nays: 39; Excused: 1

Vot­ing Yea: Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Alvara­do, Bate­man, Berg, Bergquist, Berry, Bronoske, Callan, Chap­man, Chopp, Cortes, Davis, Doglio, Don­aghy, Duerr, Enten­man, Fari­var, Fey, Fitzgib­bon, Fos­se, Good­man, Gregerson, Hack­ney, Hansen, Klo­ba, Leav­itt, Lekanoff, Macri, Mena, Mor­gan, Orms­by, Orwall, Paul, Peter­son, Pol­let, Ramel, Ramos, Reed, Reeves, Ric­cel­li, Rude, Rule, Ryu, San­tos, Senn, Shavers, Sim­mons, Slat­ter, Springer, Stearns, Stonier, Street, Tay­lor, Thai, Tharinger, Tim­mons, Walen, Wylie, Jinkins

Vot­ing Nay: Rep­re­sen­ta­tives Abbarno, Barkis, Barnard, Caldier, Cham­bers, Chan­dler, Cheney, Chris­t­ian, Con­nors, Cor­ry, Cou­ture, Dent, Dye, Eslick, Goehn­er, Gra­ham, Grif­fey, Har­ris, Hutchins, Jacob­sen, Klick­er, Kretz, Low, May­cum­ber, McClin­tock, McEn­tire, Mos­bruck­er, Orcutt, Robert­son, San­dlin, Schmick, Schmidt, Steele, Stokes­bary, Volz, Walsh, Waters, Wilcox, Ybarra

Excused: Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Ortiz-Self

One Repub­li­can joined the Demo­c­ra­t­ic cau­cus in vot­ing to sup­port the bill: Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Skyler Rude (R‑16th Dis­trict: Wal­la Wal­la). The oth­er House Repub­li­cans vot­ed no. Demo­c­ra­t­ic Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Lil­lian Ortiz-Self was excused (we have no doubt she would have vot­ed yea had she been present).

Repub­li­cans offered two amend­ments to the bill.

One, from Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Jen­ny Gra­ham (R‑6th Dis­trict: Spokane Coun­ty), would have referred the bill to the peo­ple as a ref­er­en­dum. The oth­er, from Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Jim Walsh (R‑19th Dis­trict: South­west Wash­ing­ton), would have mod­i­fied the bill to keep the death penal­ty statute on the books.

The House reject­ed both amend­ments, keep­ing the bill the same as it was when the Sen­ate vot­ed on it. For tech­ni­cal rea­sons, the vote on third read­ing was recon­sid­ered, but the out­come was the same: 58 yea votes, 39 nay votes, 1 excused. The bill now goes to Gov­er­nor Jay Inslee to be signed into law.

In 2018, NPI found in its spring statewide poll that a whop­ping 69% of like­ly Wash­ing­ton vot­ers sup­port­ed life in prison alter­na­tives to the death penal­ty, with only 24% express­ing sup­port for the death penal­ty. Not long after we released that research, the Wash­ing­ton State Supreme Court struck down the death penal­ty as uncon­sti­tu­tion­al and con­vert­ed all death sen­tences to life sen­tences, mak­ing Gov­er­nor Inslee’s mora­to­ri­um on the death penal­ty permanent.

While the Sen­ate has vot­ed to repeal the death penal­ty almost every year since Sen­a­tor Man­ka Dhin­gra’s ini­tial vic­to­ry, the House has repeat­ed­ly failed to do so, even though the votes were there. So tonight’s vote is a real breakthrough.

We are delight­ed to see more bipar­ti­san sup­port for ensur­ing that the prac­tice of exe­cu­tions nev­er resumes in Wash­ing­ton State. This is a great human rights win.

When Gov­er­nor Inslee signs SB 5087 lat­er this month, the Revised Code of Wash­ing­ton will also be free of the right wing’s long-run­ning scheme to mess with our Con­sti­tu­tion’s major­i­ty vote require­ment by spec­i­fy­ing a two-thirds vote thresh­old for rev­enue bills in clear vio­la­tion of Arti­cle II, Sec­tion 22, which says:

“No bill shall become a law unless on its final pas­sage the vote be tak­en by yeas and nays, the names of the mem­bers vot­ing for and against the same be entered on the jour­nal of each house, and a major­i­ty of the mem­bers elect­ed to each house be record­ed there­on as vot­ing in its favor.”

This scheme, first imposed via Ini­tia­tive 601 in the 1990s and reen­act­ed with Tim Eyman’s I‑960, I‑1053, and I‑1185, was intend­ed to give Repub­li­cans the equiv­a­lent of a leg­isla­tive veto over bills to raise rev­enue for Wash­ing­ton’s essen­tial pub­lic ser­vices. Now this uncon­sti­tu­tion­al lan­guage is going away.

NPI thanks all of the mem­bers of the House who vot­ed for this leg­is­la­tion today. Abol­ish­ing the death penal­ty and clean­ing up our books is one of our 2023 leg­isla­tive pri­or­i­ties, and we’re pleased to see it go to Gov­er­nor Inslee.