Washington state executed 78 people by hanging or lethal injection at the Walla Walla State Penitentiary between 1904 and 2010. Last week, Gov. Inslee attended a ceremony to officially close the chamber. The ceremony marked the end of a long legal process that ultimately saw Washington become the 21st state to abolish the death penalty.
That process began in 2014, when the governor announced a moratorium on the death penalty, following a year-long review of the state’s execution law.
In the years that followed, Katherine Beckett, a professor at the University of Washington, conducted further research on the death penalty in Washington. She and her team uncovered a pattern of racial bias stretching back decades. Data showed that Black defendants were four times more likely to be sentenced to death than defendants of other races.
Thanks in part to her research, in 2017 Washington’s Supreme Court ruled that the death penalty violated the state constitution because it had been disproportionately applied to Black defendants. In 2023, the Legislature voted to strike the death penalty from the state’s books entirely.
