Wyoming to abolish the death penalty?

In another surprising development in the legislature, a bill has been introduced, for the sixth time, to do away with capital punishment.

Now, introducing something for the sixth time wouldn't seem like news, but on this occasion the bill offered by one of the few Democrats in the legislature is receiving a lot of Republican support.  All of a sudden, a lot of Republicans are signing on in support of the bill, including some that are very well placed in the legislature.

The death penalty has been a controversial topic since at least the 1960s, but up until now there's been no indication that the state's legislature would abandon it or that Wyomingites would support that move.  Something must be changing.

And indeed, it would appear that something is.

For one thing, everyone has come to appreciate that its hugely expensive and they're sick of that.  Because of the way that Constitutional aspects of this work there's no way to address that.  People are tired of that.  And the fact that it causes endless delay in the carrying out of the sentence means that people more or less feel that the intent of the sentence really doesn't get carried out either.

Part of its justification certainly is defeated by delay, in that while its often cited that those people who receive the sentence could kill again if left to live, even in prison, they are in fact left in prison for a really long time.

Beyond that, however, there's been a slow rethinking of the death penalty in the U.S. and that appears to have reached Wyoming.  An increasing number of people aren't convinced that the sentence itself is a moral one for a variety of reasons.  That view received a bit of a boost from Pope Francis, who put the topic in the news in 2018, when he caused a modification in the Catechism of the Catholic Church precluding its use by Catholics, the largest Christian denomination by far in the world.  That sparked a lot of debates among Catholics itself, including a debate on whether that teaching was binding or not, but the fact is that it was only a slight modification of the view held by the two prior Popes.  Anyhow, with the largest Christian denomination in the world officially opposed to the penalty, at least some movement among serious conservative Christians (liberal Christians were already opposed to it) was inevitable.

I don't know what all factors resulted in this bill having a better chance than any of the prior ones in Wyoming.  It was probably a combination.  It'll be interesting to see where this bill goes.