Republicans advanced a death penalty bill in Iowa 54 years after the state abolished the death penalty.
Twenty GOP Senators signed on to the bill, versus six senators who sponsored a similar measure in 2018 that ultimately failed.
The latest bill was advanced by a Senate subcommittee with no Democrat support this week.
The bill would allow prosecutors to seek the death penalty for someone convicted of first-degree murder if the crimes also involved kidnapping and sexual abuse against a minor.
Sen. Jason Schultz, one of the Republicans supporting the bill, said that the current law creates a “perverse incentive” for a criminal to kill a victim who has been kidnapped and raped because the penalty for all three crimes is the same, life in prison without parole.
“I do not find the death penalty to be un-Biblical, un-Christian,” he said while chairing the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on Feb. 27, reported the Des Moines Register. “I believe that it doesn’t matter if it is a deterrent or not, there are some crimes for which you simply must be removed because they are so heinous and opposite the culture in which we live in.”
Sen. Jake Chapman, a Republican, said that kidnapping, rape, and murder of a minor “is about as bad as it can come.”
“There are in my opinion some crimes so heinous, so despicable that the only proper justice is to have their life taken, this being one of them,” he said.
The bill would bring back the death penalty for someone convicted of first-degree murder, kidnapping and sexual abuse against a minor.https://t.co/DP5X7IWaaM
— Des Moines Register (@DMRegister) February 28, 2019
Democrats and a number of groups voiced opposition to the bill. Karen Person with the League of Women Voters of Iowa claimed that there’s no evidence that the death penalty is a deterrent where it exists.
“The death penalty is irreversible and innocent people are known to have been executed. Iowa’s current penalty of life without the possibility of parole is a sufficiently harsh sentence,” she said.
Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, said she’s watching the bill but hasn’t committed to supporting it. She said the bill is sparking a discussion, “But there’s a lot of things that go into considering that and I haven’t seen any shift from where we were last year,” she told reporters, according to Radio Iowa.
In the last polling by the Des Moines Register in 2006, 66 percent of respondents said they’re in favor of reviving the death penalty. In a 2019 online poll by the Sioux City Journal, 70 percent said they supported reinstating the death penalty in the state.
Do you think Iowa should reinstate the death penalty? https://t.co/G8LeWlHRD7
— KCRG (@KCRG) February 28, 2019
Republicans move Iowa death penalty bill out of Senate panel https://t.co/bwDLvefzay pic.twitter.com/TeRqe9k2Jh
— KCCI News (@KCCINews) February 28, 2019
Last Execution in Iowa
The last criminal sentenced to death and executed in Iowa was Victor Feguer, who killed a doctor in Dubuque. He was executed on March 15, 1963. The state abolished the death penalty in 1965, along with New York, West Virginia, and Vermont.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Iowa executed 46 men between 1834 and 1963. Of those, 43 were executed for murder and three were executed for rape.
Author Dick Haws, who wrote the book “Iowa and the Death Penalty,” told the Globe Gazette that all of the executions were hangings.
