HELENA – On Monday, the House Judiciary Committee heard testimony on a bill to abolish the death penalty in the state.
House Bill 350, sponsored by Republican Mike Hopkins of Missoula, would replace the death penalty with a life sentence without the possibility of parole. Groups like the Montana Innocence Project and ACLU of Montana support the bill.
Those groups worry about the potential for innocent people to end up on death row.
ACLU Advocacy and Policy Director SK Rossi said during the hearing that the death penalty unfairly affects people from certain ethnic and economic backgrounds.
“A person’s chance of being executed goes up if they are not white, not wealthy or not mentally sound. As I’ve said before in this committee, the only way to guarantee a fair system that does not put innocent people to death is to abolish capital punishment completely,” Rossi said.
Opponents of the bill testified Monday the state already has the ability to sentence murderers to life in prison without parole. Some also testified the only way to keep murderers from continuing to kill, even while they are in prison, is through the death penalty.
The last person to be killed under Montana’s death penalty was in 2006 by lethal injection.
-Reported by Jacob Fuhrer/MTN News
