Pennsylvanians Against the Death Penalty

#NoDeathPenaltyPA is the official campaign to end Pennsylvania’s death penalty. We are working together to pass bills that would end Pennsylvania’s death penalty once and for all. We have strong bipartisan support in both chambers of the legislature, demonstrating how important repeal is to both sides of the aisle.

Since its reintroduction in 1978, thirteen individuals were sentenced to death but were later exonerated. These men spent a combined 182 years in prison for crimes they did not commit. During this same time period, three executions were carried out.

Alexander McClay Williams, a sixteen-year-old Black child, was the youngest person executed in the Commonwealth. An all-white Delaware County jury convicted him of murdering a white woman in 1931, and he was electrocuted without an appeal. A Common Pleas Court judge posthumously vacated his conviction in 2022, 91 years after Williams’s wrongful execution.

The death penalty has proven to be an arbitrary system that convicts – and executes – innocent people. Its use has been unequal in terms of race and geography, and it is expensive. We can keep our citizens safe and hold individuals accountable for their actions without the death penalty — in fact, it’s what we have already been doing. The last execution carried out in Pennsylvania was in 1999, so the Commonwealth has abandoned the death penalty in practice.

It’s time for Pennsylvania to move forward and join the people of 23 other states that have already abandoned the death penalty. Pennsylvania remains alone in the northeast as the last holdout with capital punishment still in its statutes.