Editorial, New York Times
The newly elected district attorney in Denver, Beth McCann, announced last month that her office would no longer seek the death penalty. “I don’t think that the state should be in the business of killing people,” she said.
In Harris County, Tex., which includes Houston and has long been one of the most execution-friendly counties in America, the new district attorney, Kim Ogg, said there would be “very few death penalty prosecutions” under her administration.
In January, the Democratic attorney general in Washington State, Bob Ferguson, proposed a bill that would ban the death penalty there. The bill is supported by the governor, Jay Inslee, a bipartisan group of legislators and, notably, by Mr. Ferguson’s Republican predecessor.
These women and men are at the forefront of a new generation of local and state law-enforcement officials, most elected in 2015 and 2016, who are working to change the national conversation about the proper role of the prosecutor — one of the most powerful yet least understood jobs in the justice system.
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