By Sven Berg
Idaho Falls Post Register
BOISE, Idaho — Mia Crosthwaite’s protests won’t save Richard Leavitt.
She knows that. Still, she will rally against Leavitt’s execution Tuesday the same way she and about 100 others protested the state-ordered death of Paul Ezra Rhoades in November.
For Crosthwaite, a member of Idahoans Against the Death Penalty, it’s not just Leavitt’s life and the lives of 12 other Idaho death row inmates that are at stake. The struggle is about more than life and death.
It’s about right and wrong.
“I could probably make an intellectual argument that the people on death row deserve to die,” Crosthwaite said. “But I will never concede that other people have a right to strap them to a table and kill them.”
Retiring state Sen. Denton Darrington, R-Declo, couldn’t disagree more.
For Darrington, putting Leavitt to death is a matter of justice.
“All of our attention at a time like this should be to the victim and the victim’s family and the brutality involved,” Darrington said. “And that’s enough for me.”
Darrington said he’s not troubled that convicts condemned to death might be innocent, despite the fact that many death row inmates have been exonerated across the nation.
Anything’s possible, he conceded, but in Leavitt’s case, he has faith that then-Bingham County Prosecutor Tom Moss never would have sought the death penalty if he were unsure of Leavitt’s guilt when he secured a conviction in 1985.
Opponents of the death penalty also argue that executing someone costs more than imprisoning him or her, even if it’s for many years.
Twenty-five years of national and state studies concluded that the expanded number of court proceedings, expert witnesses and attorneys needed in capital trials pushes the cost of execution far higher than imprisonment, Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, told the Colorado House of Representatives in 2007.
“You couldn’t find a more wasteful, ineffective government program, with the added layer of the moral quandary,” said Diann Rust-Tierney, executive director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
Darrington questioned the reliability of studies that conclude the death penalty results in a net expense to the government.
Besides fiscal and moral concerns, as well as the risk of killing an innocent person, death penalty opponents point to the emotional burden borne by people commanded to carry out the execution. Rust-Tierney said it’s simply unfair to require corrections officers to carry for the rest of their lives memories of ending another human’s life.
While Connecticut, Illinois and New Mexico are among states that abolished the death penalty in recent years, such an action seems unlikely in Idaho.
Crosthwaite acknowledged that most Idahoans traditionally have supported the death penalty. But she hopes their attitude changes as the state’s residents are exposed to executions, including those of Leavitt and Rhoades.
Another factor that could weigh in her favor is Darrington’s retirement. By his own admission, Darrington would have used his position as chairman of the state Senate Judiciary and Rules Committee to block any legislation aimed at overturning the death penalty in Idaho.
It’s impossible to say whether his successor will continue in Darrington’s footsteps or follow a different path.
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