Lawmakers in a state that abolished the death penalty in 2009 want to resurrect it for political gain, according to Democratic lawmakers in New Mexico.
This week, during a special session to address a looming, $600 million budget crisis, New Mexico’s House Republicans quietly passed a bill to reinstate the death penalty. And opponents claim they did so in order to curry favor before Election Day in November.
The legislative session took place over the course of seven days. But just before midnight on Wednesday, at 11:57 p.m, Republican representatives added a death penalty bill to the speaking calendar, which would put capital punishment sentences back on the table for people who murder children, police officers, or officers working in the penal system. Soon after 6 a.m., the bill passed by a vote of 36 to 30, in addition to a last-minute budget deal.
House Democrats and the New Mexico chapter of the nonpartisan American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) say the House’s sneaky move on Wednesday was done for political gain — not for the good of the population.
Everyone in the legislature is up for reelection in November, and Rep. Antonio “Moe” Maestas (D) told ThinkProgress that Republicans are scrambling for votes. To get them, they’re capitalizing on recent violent crimes.
“They know that the death penalty is polling very high in the Albuquerque area,” Maestas said.
Violent crime, including the rape and murder of a 10-year-old girl this year, has Albuquerque residents living in fear. And throughout the state, five police officers have been killed in the past 18 months. Republicans, Maestas said, are using those crimes for personal gain, by introducing the death penalty bill, which also included mandatory life imprisonment for three-time offenders.
Bringing up the bill on Wednesday night and passing it in the wee hours of the morning on Thursday was intentional, Maestas said. “They’re desperate, and so they risked everything by using the special session to shore up the budget as a means to bolster their campaign, with a tough-on-crime agenda.”
Rep. Monica Youngblood (R), one of the bill’s sponsors, has a different perspective.
“It isn’t capitalizing upon death. This is a bill to bring justice to those who kill innocent children and police officers,” she told ThinkProgress. “It’s not a mandatory sentence either. It was an action for district attorneys to seek what they think is an appropriate punishment.”
Youngblood noted that the bill wasn’t intentionally added to the special session calendar at the last minute, and that 65 percent of all New Mexicans support the death penalty’s reinstatement.
But the House did more than vote in favor of tougher punishment. It also pushed a budget deal that wiped out much-needed social services, according to Steven Allen, the director of public policy at the ACLU of New Mexico. Studies show that funding those services would ultimately reduce the crime rate.
“They had to chop all these social programs — education, behavioral health, and other programs that would’ve helped alleviate New Mexico’s poverty,” he said of the deal. “We need jobs. We need a good economy. Behavioral health services is a big part of it; it’s really failed in our state. We need a good educational system, substance abuse treatment programs.”
By cutting the programs, Maestas argued that the circumstances that lead to more crime aren’t likely to improve in the near future.
“Instead of talking about the economic conditions that give rise to crime, the economic failure of [Gov. Susana Martinez’ (R)] administration, and the trickle-down economic policies of the House Republicans, they want to shift the narrative to…‘vote for us and we’ll protect you.’”
Martinez is a proponent of reinstating the death penalty, and Maestas believes her years as a former prosecutor makes her less likely to push for criminal justice reform— even at a time when bipartisan support for reform is at an all-time high.
But the fate of the state’s criminal justice system won’t be determined until next year, when the new legislature convenes. If Democrats maintain their majority in the Senate, the bill is unlikely to become a law. Should Republicans win both houses, however, Albuquerque’s criminal justice system could get a big makeover.
For now, advocates of reform, as opposed to tough-on-crime policies, have to play the waiting game.
“Instead of having a real political vision and courage, what we get are these pointless distractions in the form of a death penalty bill and three strikes law that are incredibly outdated,” said Allen. “I don’t think that anyone thinks those are going to have the effect of increasing public safety in our communities, and that’s just tragic.”
Across the country, public favor for executions is on the decline. A Pew Research Center poll released last week found that public support for the death penalty is also at an all-time low, with just 49 percent of Americans’ support. By the end of 2015, the number of executions carried out across the country was the lowest in decades. Likewise, the number of people sentenced to capital punishment reached a new “historic low,” according to the Death Penalty Information Center, plummeting 33 percent since 2014.