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Indiana’s executions in December 2024 and May 2025 took place in almost total secrecy. Only Indiana and Wyoming bar the media from being present at executions. Wyoming hasn’t executed anyone in decades. Local media outlets and my Quaker meeting filed public information requests for the reliability, purity and source of execution drugs. All were denied.
Hoosiers have since learned that $1.18 million of our taxes were spent to kill two men and that $600,000 of that total was wasted because the drugs expired. According to a 29-page affidavit from Aug. 18 by a pharmacy professor who is an expert in compounding drugs, there are serious questions about the qualifications and lack of oversight of the secret suppliers of these drugs.
Gov. Mike Braun’s call for a dialogue could not be more timely.
As a Christian, a fiscal conservative, a former prosecutor and law professor, and a life-long defense attorney, I urge Hoosiers to abolish the death penalty.
In Indiana, two men on death row have been released after findings they were innocent. Nationally, there is one exoneration for every nine executions, an error rate of 12%. Would Hoosiers board planes if they crashed that often?
From 2007 to 2024, 13 states studied their death penalty statutes. Eleven abolished them completely. The remaining states—our neighbors Ohio and Kentucky—abolished capital punishment for the seriously mentally ill.
Indiana’s Legislative Services Agency found the average cost for eight death penalty cases tried by jury was $789,581, compared with $185,422 for 15 life-without-parole trials. Pursuing a death sentence quadrupled the cost. Lt. Gov. Micah Beckwith and Rep. Jim Lucas advocate for firing squads. Lucas has said bullets are “a hell of a lot less expensive” than lethal injection drugs.
But they completely ignore the fiscal data: The bulk of the expense of capital punishment has almost nothing to do with the mode of execution.
Every dollar spent on pursuing death sentences steals funds from crime-fighting tools that actually work. In 2023, Project Cold Case used the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report to calculate each state’s homicide clearance rates from 1965-2021. Indiana ranked third-to-last in clearing murder cases. As of 2025, Indiana crime labs had 600 to 800 untested rape kits. Serial rapists and murderers are free to kill and rape again in part because Indiana continues to bankroll capital punishment rather than focus on solving serious violent crimes against hundreds of past and future victims, including children.
In Indiana, there is an 80% chance that a filing for the death penalty won’t result in execution.
It is not a deterrent. A 2017 Death Penalty Information Center study spanning three decades showed that murder rates, including murders of police officers, are consistently higher in death-penalty states than in states that have abolished the death penalty.
Those who believe in “an eye for an eye” ignore Jesus’ teachings and act as if the New Testament doesn’t exist. Hoosiers don’t rape rapists or amputate thieves’ hands. We should not murder people who murder people to show murder
is wrong.•
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English is representing the Indiana Abolition Coalition with this column. A capital defense attorney, she has served as lead counsel in several Indiana death penalty cases.
She was chair of the Indiana Public Defender Council Executive Board from 1994 to 1996 and served on the Indiana Supreme Court Rules Committee from 1998 to 2006. Send comments to [email protected].
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