A panel of judges on Thursday unanimously struck down the death penalty in Washington state, ruling that it violates the state constitution.
The ruling makes Washington the latest state to do away with capital punishment, leaving 30 states in the United States that maintain the measure.
The court ordered that the eight people currently on death row in Washington should have their sentences converted to life in prison. Five justices on the state supreme court said the “death penalty is invalid because it is imposed in an arbitrary and racially biased manner”.
“Given the manner in which it is imposed, the death penalty also fails to serve any legitimate penological goals,” the justices wrote.
Four other justices on the bench, in a concurrence, wrote that while they agreed with the majority’s conclusions and invalidation of the death penalty, “additional state constitutional principles compel this result.”
Washington’s governor, Jay Inslee, a one-time supporter of capital punishment, had imposed a moratorium on the death penalty in 2014, saying that no executions would take place while he was in office. Washington has executed 78 people since 1904, all men, but no one since 2010.
In a written statement and a series of tweets, Inslee called the ruling “a hugely important moment in our pursuit for equal and fair application of justice”.
“The court makes it perfectly clear that capital punishment in our state has been imposed in an ‘arbitrary and racially biased manner,’ is ‘unequally applied’ and serves no criminal justice goal,” Inslee wrote.
The ruling was in the case of Allen Eugene Gregory, who was convicted of raping, robbing and killing Geneine Harshfield, a 43-year-old woman, in 1996. His lawyers said the death penalty is arbitrarily applied and that it is not applied proportionally, as the state constitution requires.
In its ruling on Thursday, the court did not reconsider any of Gregory’s arguments pertaining to guilt, noting that his conviction for aggravated first-degree murder “has already been appealed and affirmed by this court”.
