Moratorium on death penalty urged

By Bill Draper - Associated Press Writer

Thursday, January 22, 2004

Topeka — A former state senator urged legislators Wednesday to place a two-year moratorium on imposing the death sentence and executing those who already have been sentenced to die.

Tim Emert, an attorney from Independence, told the Senate Judiciary Committee that no issue was as troubling to him during his eight years as a senator as deciding where he stood on the death penalty.

Emert became vice chairman of the Judiciary Committee soon after taking office in 1993 and was on the committee the next year when the Legislature reinstituted capital punishment.

"I came to the conclusion the only vote I could live with was a ‘no' vote on the death penalty in Kansas," said Emert, who was elected to the Legislature as a Republican. "I could not, in my mind, be pro-life and pro death penalty."

A moratorium bill currently before the committee would also create a seven-member commission to study such issues as the costs of capital murder cases and whether there's a disparity on how death penalty cases are handled in different parts the state.

Charles McAtee, now a Topeka attorney, supervised the state's last four executions in 1965 as director of penal institutions. He said he saw no reason for a death penalty moratorium.

"I really don't understand the move to a moratorium in Kansas, except maybe the cost issue," McAtee said Wednesday. "The rationale completely escapes me."

McAtee said he joked occasionally about wanting someone to be executed in Kansas so he could shed the label as the last prison director to oversee an execution in the state.

AP Photo Donna Schneweis, a Kansas death penalty abolition coordinator with Amnesty International USA, talks to reporters after a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on a bill that would put a two-year moratorium on the death penalty. Bill Lucero, with Murder Victims Families Reconciliation, holding the briefcase in the foreground, also spoke Wednesday with reporters at the Capitol in Topeka.

"I keep saying I will be glad when we get a fresh one under their belts so reporters can talk to the secretary of corrections then about his feelings," he said.

He was in charge when the state's most famous executions -- those of Richard Hickock and Perry Smith -- took place. They were executed for the 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, a crime that was the basis for the book "In Cold Blood."

Judiciary Committee Chairman John Vratil said a two-year moratorium on executions probably was not needed, since it took an average of 10 years from the time a person was sentenced to death to the time execution was carried out.

"I haven't really decided where I stand on this," said Vratil, R-Leawood. "Nobody is going to be executed in the next two years, anyway."

There have been no executions in Kansas since the state re-established the death penalty in 1994. Seven people currently are on death row.

In December, a legislative audit suggested the state could reduce the number of capital trials -- which are significantly more expensive than noncapital cases -- by creating a mandatory life sentence for some murders.

The auditors found the median cost of a case resulting in a death sentence was $1.2 million, compared to $740,000 in a case in which a death sentence wasn't pursued.

The toughest nondeath penalty now is life in prison with no chance of parole for 50 years.