Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro is asking legislators to spare everyone on his state’s death row from execution, including those who murdered police officers and children.
Pennsylvania law requires the governor to sign an execution warrant before an inmate can be put to death, but Shapiro said alongside Democratic State Sen. Vince Hughes, Sen. Nikil Saval and Rep. Rick Krajewski Thursday he would not issue any such warrants during his term and called for the state.
General Assembly to move to abolish capital punishment altogether. More than 100 men are currently sentenced to death in Pennsylvania, some of them having killed law enforcement personnel and children.
“At a time when Pennsylvanians are concerned about their personal safety and the safety of their families as we deal with a historic spike in violent crime, it is clear now is not the time to stop holding criminals to the highest level of accountability for the most heinous crimes,” Pennsylvania House Republican Caucus spokesperson Jason Gottesman told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Removing this measure of accountability and deterrence from prosecutorial discretion is at best tone deaf to the concerns of Pennsylvanians and at worst disrespectful to the victims of the most serious crimes in our society.”
Shapiro had advocated for capital punishment abolition during his campaign, and Pennsylvania’s last execution occurred in 1999, according to the Pennsylvania Capital-Star. Previous Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf instituted an execution moratorium in 2015.
A jury sentenced Eric Frein to death after he shot and killed a state police corporal and injured a trooper at the Blooming Grove, Pennsylvania State Police Barracks in September 2014 before being captured that October 30 and was ultimately convicted of charges including terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, according to court records.
Frein wrote a letter to his parents prior to arrest talking of revolution and saying, “The time seems right for a spark to ignite a fire in the hearts of men. What I have done has not been done before and it felt like it was worth a try.”
Richard Poplawski received a death sentence for murdering three police officers at his mother’s Pittsburgh home in 2009 after she called the police following an argument in which she threatened to have him removed from the house, court documents show. Poplawski, who was in his early twenties, was taken to the hospital and later told two officers there, “I should have killed more of you.”
Drug addict Paul Gamboa-Taylor was convicted of murdering two of his own young children, his wife, his mother-in-law and her two-year-old daughter using a hammer in 1991 in York, Pennsylvania, according to legal records. Gamboa-Taylor was sentenced to death the next year.
Harvey Miguel Robinson raped and killed 29-year-old Joan Burghardt, 15-year-old newspaper delivery girl Charlotte Schmoyer and forty-seven year-old Jessica Jean Fortney and raped thirty-eight-year-old Denise Sam-Cali in less than a year from 1992 to 1993, legal documents indicate. Robinson was 18 years old when he attacked the second two victims, based on Pennsylvania Department of Corrections records.
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