Inside the growing conservative movement to end the death penalty

After years of sitting on death row in Oklahoma, Richard Glossip was scheduled to die on Wednesday. But today, Friday, he's still alive. That's thanks to a last-minute, two-week reprieve — which was granted in no small part because of a growing cadre of conservative activists who oppose the death penalty.

Glossip's case — he was convicted of hiring someone to kill his boss — had exhausted every avenue of appeal, even briefly heading to the Supreme Court last year as the justices weighed the legality of lethal injection. But time and again, state officials and the legal system rejected his team's claims of innocence.

In recent weeks, pressure began to mount from evangelicals, young activists, and figures in the local media who wanted the state to take one last look at his case. The outreach to these groups came largely from an organization called Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty. Their outreach specialist is a man named Marc Hyden, a former campaign field representative for the National Rifle Association who argues that opposing capital punishment is a natural philosophical fit for tough-minded conservatives.

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"Point to a single government program that works flawlessly. Death penalty supporters have to accept that it's a human-run program and so my question is, how many innocent people are you willing to execute?" Hyden told me.

The fallibility of government is just one of several strategic points from which Hyden and his conservative constituency come at capital punishment. They are also quick to point out that putting someone to death is far more expensive than simply keeping them in prison. Then there's the empirical data challenging whether the threat of execution is truly a disincentive for would-be criminals. Some anecdotal accounts challenge whether families of victims benefit in any measurable way from seeing a perpetrator put to death. And for the truly committed pro-life believer, there is the larger philosophical dilemma of whether a God-fearing society should be empowering the state to execute its citizens.

But none of these arguments carries the weight of innocence.

That brings us to the case of Ray Krone, an early player in state Republican politics before he was wrongfully convicted of murder. In 2002, Krone rose to prominence when he became the 100th U.S. citizen exonerated from death row since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.

"I was in the Boy Scouts and the church choir. I did six years in the Air Force, seven years in the Post Office," Krone said in a phone interview. "This could be your son, father, neighbor. I didn't have hundreds of thousands of dollars for a great lawyer and most people facing death row probably don't either. How many innocent people take a plea bargain?"

That's where Hyden and conservatives find common ground with very liberal figures, such as the actress Susan Sarandon.

Sarandon has been vocally involved in Glossip's case, teaming up with Sister Helen Prejean, whom Sarandon portrayed in her Oscar-winning performance in Dead Man Walking. When I asked Sarandon what she thinks about her strange bedfellows, she said, "There's a lot of common ground there," noting with a laugh that's not something she would normally say about a group of conservative Republicans. "From a philosophical point of view, they're being very consistent in challenging government power."

Forty years ago, the death penalty was far less common than it is today. But as the nation recoiled from a sense of liberal policies gone awry amid spiking crime rates, most of the country was all too happy to get behind a tougher criminal justice approach. And for hungry prosecutors in states where a strong conviction record is intrinsically tied to a bright political future, sentencing a violent criminal to death became a badge of honor.

Today, the death penalty is still supported by a majority of Americans, particularly conservative ones. However, the opposition has a few vocal opponents on the right, including former RNC Chairman Michael Steele and Oliver North. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has expressed his own skepticism, but it's unlikely to become a relevant issue on the 2016 presidential campaign trail. No one wants to become the next Michael Dukakis, forced into the emasculating position of defending the human rights of a spouse's imaginary sexual predator.

For those opposed to the death penalty, the strategy is largely mirrored in the push for same-sex marriage. Change policy at the state level and hope that doing so serves as the catalyst for a shift in public opinion, eventually leading to more direct action at the federal level.

Support for the death penalty has noticeably dropped, peaking at 80 percent in the mid-1990s and dropping to 63 percent in the most recent Gallup data available. However, only 33 percent of people say they oppose capital punishment, still nearly 10 percent away from when the country was more or less split on the issue from the early 1960s through the mid '70s. Ironically, it was during a four-year suspension by the Supreme Court, from 1972 to 1976, that support for state-sanctioned murder began to peak.

Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty got off the ground in 2010 in Montana, an ideal breeding ground for forward-thinking conservative positions. After all, this is the same state where citizens have tussled with the federal government over using their gun registration cards to purchase medical marijuana.

Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty has expanded to states including Florida, Delaware, Tennessee, Kentucky, North Carolina, Texas, Georgia, Connecticut, and Nebraska. The latter two abolished capital punishment this year. Altogether, seven states have banned the death penalty since 2000, by far the biggest shift in American history.

Over the coming days and weeks, Glossip's case will bring an increased spotlight to capital punishment and whether it has a place in modern American society. It's unlikely any one case will prove to be the tipping point, but when you consider that just five years ago, legalized marijuana and gay marriage seemed farfetched to most, it's not crazy to think that with a bipartisan coalition opposing it, the death penalty may soon find itself on life support, too.