The debate whether to abolish Montana’s death penalty pitted prosecutor against prosecutor and crime victim against crime victim Wednesday, as a bill repealing the penalty had its first hearing in the House.
The bill, which has passed the Senate, drew support from high-profile figures like former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Karla Gray and Jim Bromgard, the Billings man who spent 15 years in prison for rape before he was exonerated by DNA evidence in 2002.
Bromgard said if the victim, a young girl, had been murdered, he might have been wrongly sentenced to death and exe-cuted before the hair samples used to convict him were found to be erroneous.
"Science is only as good as the human beings that present it," he said. "If we are honest and we accept that these things happen, there is no place for the death penalty in Montana."
Other supporters of Senate Bill 236 included the state’s former top prosecutor and friends and family of those horribly murdered, who said a death sentence is an ineffective punishment that doesn’t deter crime, hurts the victims more than the criminal, and brings shame to a society that claims to abhor violence.
Yet the House Judiciary Committee heard compelling testimony from the other side as well, with prosecutors, pastors and relatives of murder victims arguing the death penalty serves both to protect the innocent and bring criminals to justice.
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SB236, sponsored by Sen. Dave Wanzenried, D-Missoula, would abolish the death penalty in Montana and replace it with life in prison without parole. If the bill passes, the two men on Montana’s death row would be resentenced to life in prison.
The House Judiciary Committee took no immediate action on the bill. Supporters of SB236 said they expect the panel to vote on the measure on Monday.
Gray, Montana’s chief justice on the Supreme Court from 2001-2008, said she did her job as a justice and signed opin-ions upholding the death penalty, as it complied with the law.
Yet she reminded the panel that it’s not the "state" that actually carries out the death penalty, but rather actual people, from justices to jurors to prison officers. A death certificate for an executed prisoner lists "homicide" as the cause of death, she said.
"Did (we) purposely or knowingly cause the death of another human being?" Gray said. "We did and we have to live with it. Please get Montana out of the state-sanctioned homicide business."
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