Isaac Hale, Daily Herald file photo Daily Herald

A shiver ran through the hearts of some residents in Utah County as they heard Wednesday that Utah County Attorney David Leavitt intends to do away with the death penalty on capital cases in the county.

“Every County attorney is given the opportunity to choose,” said Sherrie Hall Everett, spokeswoman.

In announcing his reasoning for not pursuing the death penalty in his jurisdiction, Leavitt has saved Jerrod Baum, charged in the deaths of two teenagers whose bodies were found in a mineshaft near Eureka, from the potential sentence.

Family members of the deceased said they were “blindsided” by Leavitt’s decision in a Facebook post.

In a videotaped message, Leavitt acknowledged that violent and dangerous people belong in prison — both for the public’s protection and for the criminal’s punishment.

Isaac Hale, Daily Herald

Continuing with the death penalty is not part of best practices for the Attorney’s office or the court, according to Leavitt.

“Shortly after I took office, it fell to me to decide whether to seek death in a homicide case that my office was prosecuting,” he said. “I spent months weighing the decision as the case made its way through the process.”

Leavitt said he knew, at least academically, that deciding to seek the death penalty would require huge taxpayer resources — both for the prosecution and for the defense; not to mention the costs of a decades-long appeals process if the defendant was found guilty.

“In my decision to seek the death penalty, I became the first Utah County Attorney since 1984 to do so,” Leavitt said. “That decision has required an enormous expenditure of resources both in time and taxpayer dollars.”

“All of what we’ve spent, and more, would be worth it if it would prevent another senseless murder from occurring. But it doesn’t and it won’t,” he added.

Leavitt said that pretending that the death penalty will somehow curb crime is “simply a lie.”

“The answer to preventing these types of horrible crimes is in education and prevention before they occur. No family wants to hear, ‘My child is dead and that man got a long sentence.’ What they want to hear is, ‘My child was never killed,'” Leavitt said.

“The reality in any death penalty case is that even if a jury were to deliver a verdict of death, my thirty years as a criminal justice lawyer convince me that the death penalty will never be carried out again in this state — nor should it,” he added.

It’s time to change course, according to Leavitt. “There’s a better route, and we’re going to seek it.”

In his reasoning over the matter, Leavitt compared two death penalty cases, Gary Gillmore and Ron Lafferty.

Gillmore killed Max Jensen, a gas station attendant in Orem on July 19, 1976, and Bennie Bushnell, a motel manager in Provo, the next day.

He was sentenced to die for his crimes and was executed after one appeal. It took six months from the sentencing to execution.

It was the first execution in the United States in more than a decade. Gillmore became immortalized through the book and subsequent movie, “The Executioner’s Song.”

In a 180-degree difference, Leavitt reminded residents of the Lafferty Murders in which Ron and Dan Lafferty, self-proclaimed prophets, slashed the throats of their sister-in-law Brenda Lafferty, who was married to Allen Lafferty, and her 15-month-old daughter Erica on July 24, 1984.

Dan received life in prison and Ron was given the death penalty. Their trials were held in 1985.

Ron’s appeals went to the 10th Circuit Court and they reversed the conviction, saying Ron had not been competent to stand trial. The state filed an appeal which the U.S. Supreme Court then turned down.

After three years in the Utah State Hospital, Ron Lafferty was found to be competent again and went to trial with the same conclusion — the death penalty.

For 35 years, Ron’s competency remained the question. It went from competent to not competent a number of times and each time the trials had their own series of appeals.

On Aug. 12, 2019, the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals refused to hear Ron’s case. He was to be executed by firing squad, but it never happened.

Ron Lafferty died on death row at the Utah State Prison due to natural causes on Nov. 11, 2019.

The 2003 book “Under the Banner of Heaven” told the story of the Lafferty murders and will be adapted into a limited series for FX and Hulu in the near future, according to The Salt Lake Tribune.

“What we have learned since Gary Gillmore, is that innocent people have been executed and that the penalty of death has been carried out inconsistently and discriminatorily,” Leavitt said. “What we have also learned is that the death penalty does not promote community safety. It is not an effective deterrent. It simply demonstrates our societal preference for retribution over public safety.”

“My commitment to you when I took office was to focus our efforts on community protection rather than on methods of the past that have long since proven ineffective,” he noted.

“Focusing on ALL victims by no longer seeking the death penalty advances that commitment,” Leavitt said.

Trying capital crimes is an increasing source of fiscal distress for counties, and the cost of paying for these expensive convictions has fueled a public debate about their effectiveness in deterring crime and on whom the burden of paying for them should fall. Death penalty cases cost millions of dollars, according to Hall Everett.

Since nine out of ten defendants in capital crime trials are indigent, counties must often pay legal costs for both prosecution and defense, Hall Everett added.

Utah Rep. Lowry Snow, R-St. George, and state Sen. Dan McCay, R-Riverton, jointly announced Wednesday that they are sponsoring a bill in the upcoming 2022 Legislative General Session, to “repeal and replace” the death penalty in Utah, according to Connor Boyack of the Libertas Institute.

This effort follows an emerging trend of other states abandoning capital punishment, including Virginia earlier this year and Colorado in 2020. Utah, often known for its thoughtful and measured approach to complicated issues may be the next state to take legalized killings off the table, Boyack added.

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