What can and should be done about Pennsylvania's decade-long moratorium on executions?

This new piece in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, which is headlined "Death row inmates stay indefinitely: No one has been executed in Pennsylvania since 1999," raises the question in the title of the post.  As the start of the article highlights, Pennsylvania's Governor continues to sign death warrants despite recognizing that the state has had a de facto moratorium on executions for more than a decade:

Richard Baumhammers and Ronald Taylor have a lot in common.  Both are racially motivated mass killers who slaughtered innocents within a month of each other a decade ago, Mr. Baumhammers targeting minorities and Mr. Taylor targeting whites.  Both are on death row.  And neither is likely to be executed for many years, if ever.

Gov. Ed Rendell signed a death warrant for Mr. Baumhammers, 44, last week, but he admitted the execution isn't likely to happen on March 18, the scheduled date for lethal injection.  That's because the state has what the governor calls a "de facto" moratorium on executions.

The governor has signed 101 death warrants, including one for Mr. Taylor in 2006.  But the state hasn't killed anyone since Gary Heidnik in 1999.  More than 220 prisoners are on death row statewide.

It strike me as problematic and irresponsible (not to mention expensive) for the executive branch in Pennsylvania to keep pursuing death sentences and signing death warrants if it is now a legal and political given that the state will never be able to actually carry out an execution.  Indeed, there are reasons to suspect and fear that juries in Pennsylvania may be more likely to return a death verdict based on the (apparently reasonable) assumption that no defendant will actually ever again be executed in the state.

Of course, if state and federal judges are truly dead set against letting any Pennsylvania murderers get to the death chamber, there may little that the executive or legislative branch in Pennsylvania can do to alter these realities.  But, as the question in title of this post is meant to suggest, I suspect that Keystone State legislators and executive official could probably do something to try to break this harmful capital punishment log-jam.  And perhaps readers can use the comments to make some suggestions for those (few? many?) Pennsylvania lawmakers and officials who may be truly troubled by the state's decade-long de facto moratorium on executions.