A Rising Democratic Star Just Became a New Anti–Death Penalty Hero

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When the history of America’s long journey toward the abolition of capital punishment is written, it will be studded with the names of people who, in their time, took little-noticed decisions to oppose the death penalty. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear will likely be one of those people.

Beshear, a rising star in the Democratic Party, is not a prominent and outspoken abolitionist. In fact, during an October 2023 gubernatorial debate with his Republican opponent, Beshear explained that there are “some crimes so terrible and some people so dangerous that I do believe this law needs to continue to be on the books.”

With statements like that, Beshear certainly does not sound like a candidate for the abolitionist Hall of Fame. But consider what he did late last month, when he refused to authorize the execution of Ralph Baze, who was convicted of murdering two police officers and would later be the lead plaintiff in an unsuccessful constitutional challenge to lethal injection.

Beshear’s refusal was enormously significant in forestalling a real step backward for the abolitionist movement.

And, while it is by no means the death penalty capital of the United States, the fate of capital punishment may be determined in places like Kentucky, places I call death penalty “swing states,” and not just in states with many executions like Texas, Oklahoma, or Alabama.

A death penalty swing state is one in which the death penalty remains an authorized punishment, but in which executions seldom occur and death sentences are seldom handed down. As the Death Penalty Information Center notes, “Although the United States is con­sid­ered a death penal­ty coun­try, exe­cu­tions are rare or non-exis­tent in most of the nation.”

Right now, there are 10 death penalty states in which no one has been executed in the past 10 years. Kentucky is one of those states, along with California, Idaho, Kansas, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Wyoming. Three other death penalty states—Arkansas, Nebraska, and Ohio—have not carried out an execution in the past five years.

The reasons why states retain the death penalty but don’t use it are quite varied. Some states stop executing because of the difficulty of obtaining the drugs needed to carry out lethal injection or problems they’ve encountered in the administration of capital punishment. In other states, governors have declared a moratorium on executions.

Still others seem disinclined to go forward with executions but have not mustered the political momentum to take the death penalty off the books. For example, Kansas has not executed anyone in almost 50 years; Wyoming has not done so since 1992.

Kentucky carried out its last execution in November 2008 when Marco Allen Chapman was put to death for the gruesome murder of two children and the rape of their mother. All told, the Bluegrass State has executed only three people in the past half-century.

Its death penalty history dates back to 1780, before it was granted statehood, when it carried out its first judicially authorized execution. Since then, Kentucky has gone on to set the record for the most exe­cu­tions in a sin­gle day. On July 13, 1928, it used the electric chair to put seven men to death, one after the other.

Eight years later, it was the site of this nation’s last public execution.

In 1998, though, the state became the first to enact a Racial Justice Act. That act authorizes judges in capital cases to consider whether racial bias played a role in any decision to seek, or impose, the death penalty. Kentucky has not carried out an execution in more than a decade because of problems with its lethal injection protocol and various legal challenges to it. The DPIC reports that “in 2006, death-sen­tenced pris­on­ers filed a law­suit alleg­ing the exe­cu­tion pro­to­col had not fol­lowed the prop­er admin­is­tra­tive rule­mak­ing process.” Since then, legal challenges have focused on the state’s “fail­ure to pro­vide a sin­gle-drug lethal injec­tion option, inad­e­quate pro­tec­tions against exe­cut­ing peo­ple with intel­lec­tu­al dis­abil­i­ty, and inad­e­quate pro­tec­tions against exe­cut­ing those con­sid­ered insane.”

In 2019, a judge found the state’s exe­cu­tion pro­to­col ​to be “unconstitutional and invalid,” and issued an injunction. But that did not stop Kentucky’s Republican Attorney General Russell Coleman from calling on the governor last month to set an execution date for Baze.

Coleman has been fighting to restart executions since he took office. His request put the progressive governor in a difficult spot in deep-red Kentucky.

But Beshear held firm and kept his state in the group of death penalty swing states. He told the AG that he would not authorize Baze’s execution because of continuing problems and unresolved legal issues with the state’s execution protocol. As recently as April of this year, a Kentucky trial judge found that the state still had not fixed those problems.

In response to Coleman’s request, the governor would not jump the gun just to score political points. He pointed out that Kentucky “does not currently have, nor can it obtain, the drugs necessary to carry out lethal injection executions.”

So, Kentucky remains a place with 25 men on death row. The last death sentence handed down in the state was in 2014.

States that move from the group that has not executed anyone in a long time to actually executing set an unfortunate example for other swing states that may encourage them to follow suit. We know that imitation is an important mechanism for the spread of policies or state actions, and this is as true in the realm of the death penalty as in any other area.

As I wrote previously, “Political leaders in one place scan the horizon looking to other places to see [what is happening] and to learn what works and what doesn’t. The federal system provides the framework within which this learning and borrowing can occur.”

That neighboring Indiana recently broke from the group of death penalty swing states after having not carried out an execution in 15 years makes Beshear’s refusal to issue a death warrant all the more significant. It helps avoid a kind of domino effect involving other swing states, including Ohio to the north and Pennsylvania to the northeast.

Beshear is an example of a political leader for whom the abstract belief that some people may deserve death as a punishment for their crimes gives way to a realistic assessment of the way the death penalty works, or does not work, in practice. It is that assessment that has fueled the substantial progress that abolitionists have made in changing the national conversation about capital punishment.

For his refusal to let Kentucky restart what the late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun once called “the machinery of death” and for the political courage it took to do that, Andy Beshear may rightly be called an anti–death penalty hero.

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