CARSON CITY -- A bill to outlaw the death penalty for those younger than 18 years is on its way to Gov. Kenny Guinn for his signature after a reluctant Senate approved the measure Thursday.
Assembly Bill 6 was compelled by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in March. The bill was approved 15-6 on Thursday but some of the senators who voted for the bill said they were personally opposed to it.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Raggio, R-Reno, a former prosecutor for 18 years, said this "was one step further down the road to doing away with the death penalty." He said capital punishment is supported by a majority of the public and by a majority of state legislatures.
Raggio has sworn to uphold the decisions of the Supreme Court but in this case he is doing so reluctantly. Sen. Warren Hardy, R-Las Vegas, echoed Raggio's remarks.
Sen. Bob Coffin, D-Las Vegas, talked about how he had been badly beaten by a gang in Las Vegas headed by the then-17-year-old Patrick McKenna. Years later McKenna, then 33, was convicted of murder and sentenced to death for the killing of an inmate in the Clark County jail.
Coffin said he "eagerly awaits" McKenna's execution.
Coffin also talked about another case, of another 17-year-old who stabbed his sister-in-law in 1993 and received 20 years in prison. She survived but was physicially and psychologically damaged. "I wanted this man dead," he said.
In February, the state Parole Board agreed to release the individual. He said he met with the unidentified man. "He did not know what he was doing 12 years ago -- I wanted him dead -- now I want him alive."
Sen. Maurice Washington, R-Sparks, said there were four reasons he opposed the bill. He said it was hard to tell people who suffered the loss of a loved one that there was no death penalty. He said this was a separation-of-powers issue and the Supreme Court should not be telling the Legislature what to do.
The Supreme Court was also "treading on state's rights," Washington said, and the court ruling "erodes the protection of society." The death penalty acts as a deterrent, he said.
Raggio, former district attorney in Washoe County, recalled the 1960 case of Thomas Bean, who at the age of 17 strangled, raped and cut up the body of Sonja McCaskie in her home.
Bean was sentenced to death but the Supreme Court later overturned all the death penalties in the nation. And the states had to re-enact new laws.
Bean is still in prison, serving a life term without possibility of parole.
Raggio complained that the Supreme Court based its decision in March this year in part on weight of international feeling that the United States was one of only a few countries that continued to have capital punishment.
"American law should not be bent to conform to the rest of the laws of the world," he said.
It's one thing to bar capital punishment for a person who is mentally retarded and yet another thing to say that a person who is not quite 18 is not capable of fulling understanding the difference between right and wrong when it comes to a heinous crime, Raggio said.
Voting against AB6 were Washington; Dean Rhoads, R-Tuscarora; Barbara Cegavske, R-Las Vegas; Mike McGinness, R-Fallon; Joe Heck, R-Las Vegas; and John Lee, D-North Las Vegas.
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