Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge. (Provided by the Montana Department of Corrections.)
An attempt to reopen to the door to state executions in Montana for prisoners sentenced to the death penalty has died in the House.
Montana stopped lethal injections after an order in 2015 from district court Judge Jeffrey Sherlock. The judge found the drug the state had been using, pentobarbital, was not “ultra-fast acting,” as required by law, which made execution protocol invalid in Montana, said Rep. Shannon Maness, R-Dillon.
Maness pitched House Bill 205, to remove the language requiring an “ultra-fast acting” drug in combination with a “chemical paralytic agent.” The bill would have replaced that language with a “substance or substances in a lethal quantity sufficient to cause death.”
The bill was controversial in a committee hearing, and it failed on the House floor last Thursday on a 49-51 vote.
Friday, Maness said he accepted that outcome because he didn’t believe it could get two more votes.
A short debate took place on the floor before the vote.
Rep. Zach Wirth, R-Wolf Creek, said he believes in being pro-life from “the womb to the tomb,” and Jesus asked people to forgive others, so he couldn’t support the bill.
“When we perpetuate something like this, the death penalty, although as repugnant as the crimes can be, I still cannot support the death penalty,” Wirth said.
Moderating the debate, Rep. Katie Zolnikov, R-Billings, reminded Wirth the debate was about the means of injection, not about the death penalty itself.
In support of the bill, Rep. Bill Mercer, R-Billings, said Montana has the authority to use the death penalty, but the option wouldn’t be available without changing the language, as Maness had presented.
The bill drew opposition at a committee hearing from the ACLU of Montana, a pastor, the Montana Innocence Project, and other parties. Concerns included its lack of specificity regarding the type of drugs that could be used.
The state has not executed a person who is sentenced to die since 2006.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, two people in Montana are on death row, and three people have been executed since 1976.