Maher / 4 – Senator Jerry C Senate 4.

A BILL
To state that Death Penalty is unconstitutional

1 Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
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3 SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE
4 This act may be cited as the Death Penalty Abolition Act of 2020
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6 SECTION 2. FINDINGS
7 Congress hereby finds and declares that,
8 1) Almost all of the people selected for execution are poor, some of them are members of racial minorities, some of
9 them have mental illness, and some of them lived on the margins of society before their arrests.
10 2) The majority of criminals who received death penalty are crimes against white victims.
11 3) According to the Equal Justice Initiative, 95% of convicts languishing on death row in the United States come
12 from underprivileged backgrounds. Their court-appointed lawyers often don’t have the means to expedite the DNA
13 or ballistics tests that could unravel the prosecution’s case.
14 4) Over 75% of the murder victims in cases resulting in an execution were white, even
15 though nationally only 50% of murder victims generally are white.
16 5) The death penalty costs more than life without parole, does not reduce murder rates.
17 6) Defense costs for death penalty trials in Kansas averaged about $400,000 per case, compared to $100,000 per case
18 when the death penalty was not sought.
19 7) A new study in California revealed that the cost of the death penalty in the state has been over $4 billion since
20 1978. Study considered pretrial and trial costs, costs of automatic appeals and state habeas corpus petitions, costs of
21 federal habeas corpus appeals, and costs of incarceration on death row.
22 8) Since 1973, more than 150 people have been released from death row with evidence of their innocence.
23 9) At least 4.1% of all defendants sentenced to death in the US in the modern era are innocent, according to the first
24 major study to attempt to calculate how often states get it wrong in their wielding of the ultimate punishment.
25 10) As long as a criminal received a death penalty, there is no change to revise the case, even the judge realize the
26 solution is wrong later on.
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28 SECTION 3. STATUTORY LANGUAGE
29 A) Death Penalty Abolition Act prohibited capital publishment in any situation.
30 B) Criminals with serious crime will receive life imprisonment instead of Capital Publishment
31 C) Any court execution of the death penalty will be subject to federal interrogation. This bill shall be evaluated every
32 10 years. This bill shall be enacted on January 1, 2020.
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