PHOENIX — A former Republican legislator and a Flagstaff doctor are launching a campaign to repeal the death penalty in Arizona.
The initiative would repeal sections of statute that allow individuals to be executed by the state. Instead, those who would otherwise be sentenced to death would serve out the rest of their lives behind bars.
That change, if approved by voters in 2016, also would commute the sentences of the 118 individuals currently on death row.
Bob Hungerford, who served in the Legislature in the 1970s, said the proposal is an outgrowth of efforts Death Penalty Alternatives for Arizona and its predecessor organizations have been working on for years. He said the move now is to parlay that public education effort into actually changing the law.
But it won’t be easy.
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“We know we have an uphill fight,” said David Spence. He said there’s no identified source of money to gather 150,642 valid signatures by next July to put the measure on the ballot, nor any cash set aside for an advertising campaign.
But Spence believes he can get public attention through a volunteer effort. And he said the media attention may come if the initiative can persuade the Republican-controlled Senate to at least consider bills that have been sponsored by two Democrats to do the same things. The bills have never even gotten a hearing.
Count on prosecutors to lead the opposition.
“The ultimate crime deserves the ultimate punishment,” said Attorney General Mark Brnovich. “Too often, we focus on the defendants and what they’re going through and we forget about the horrible crimes these individuals committed and the horrible stress and tragedies that befell the victims.”
Maricopa County Attorney Bill Montgomery, who said he’s met Hungerford, a former chairman of the Maricopa County Republican Committee, and respects him. But Montgomery had a slightly different take on the issue than the attorney general.
“If he ran an initiative that ended abortion and the death penalty, I could get behind that,” Montgomery said. “If it is only to end death penalty, I doubt there will be arguments offered (by initiative backers) that objective data cannot rebut.”
Moral arguments aside, Spence said there is data to support following the lead of the Nebraska Legislature which just this year voted to end capital punishment.
One is cost. He said the state spends far more prosecuting and handling the appeals on a death penalty case — including often paying for lawyers and investigators for the defense — than it would if the prosecutor instead sought life in prison. Brnovich did not dispute that but said that argument holds no water for him.
“Opponents of the death penalty have been engaging in a decades-long guerrilla war to make the death penalty expensive and unpopular,” he said. “You can’t put a price on justice.”
