What’s the matter with Kansas? Perhaps not as much as previously thought…

On January 19 the Kansas legislature will hold four days of hearings to establish whether or not to repeal the death penalty. Should this bill pass Kansas will become the third state in as many years to abolish capital punishment.

"What’s the matter with Kansas?" So asked Thomas Frank in his 2004 lament over the rise of conservatism in a state previously known as a bastion of liberalism. Sadly, the new climate also brought legislative support for capital punishment.

Kansas had originally abolished the death penalty on January 30th 1907, subsequently celebrated as Abolition Day, but the legislature re-introduced it in 1935 -- a decision which Truman Capote blamed partly on the "sudden prevalence in the Midwest of rampaging professional criminals". Following the US Supreme Court's 1976 decision that capital punishment was unconstitutional, and the subsequent overruling of this in 1977, Kansas introduced the current death penalty law in April 1994. 

Yet, as the Christian Science Monitor reported this week, perhaps there is not quite so much the matter with Kansas after all.

On January 19 the Kansas legislature will hold four days of hearings to establish whether or not to repeal the death penalty. Should this bill pass Kansas will become the third state in as many years to abolish capital punishment and the sixteenth US state to do so.

Sadly, although perhaps not surprisingly, much of the debate has centred on the astronomical costs of maintaining the death penalty. Kansas Senator Carolyn McGinn wrote an opinion piece in early 2009 arguing for the abolition of capital punishment because the estimated median cost of a death-sentence case is a phenomenal 70% more than that of a murder case where death was not sought.

There are ten men on death row in Kansas who face the excruciating, arduous capital appeals process and the prospect of execution. Though it is disappointing that arguments of costs and economics are front and centre, to these ten men and their families the specifics will be of little concern. They will just be hoping that come January 19th Kansas makes the right decision.