Now here is the thing. And this is the reason the death penalty was already illegal in Washington state, even before Inslee signed this bill earlier today.
However high we put this reasonable doubt, it is bound to be pretty arbitrary, and when you have an arbitrary marker, biases are quick to step in. The supreme court of WA found this arbitrariness to cause racial bias in who gets sentenced to death in the state. And this racial bias was deemed unconstitutional in the state, so the death penalty was abolished in 2018.
Interestingly the bias was actually found and published in a regression analysis study which the justices used when backing their ruling.
The bill Inslee signed was merely a removing of this punishment (as other unconstitutional laws) from the legal code.
So, no, this cannot simply be addressed by simply raising the bar, that is unless you find a way to remove biases from jurors, or otherwise find an objective framework in a messy world, or else you risk having a punishment which discriminates against racial lines, which is unconstitutional.
However high we put this reasonable doubt, it is bound to be pretty arbitrary, and when you have an arbitrary marker, biases are quick to step in. The supreme court of WA found this arbitrariness to cause racial bias in who gets sentenced to death in the state. And this racial bias was deemed unconstitutional in the state, so the death penalty was abolished in 2018.
Interestingly the bias was actually found and published in a regression analysis study which the justices used when backing their ruling.
The bill Inslee signed was merely a removing of this punishment (as other unconstitutional laws) from the legal code.
So, no, this cannot simply be addressed by simply raising the bar, that is unless you find a way to remove biases from jurors, or otherwise find an objective framework in a messy world, or else you risk having a punishment which discriminates against racial lines, which is unconstitutional.