Group of elected prosecutors pledge to work toward elimination of the death penalty nationwide

This new NBC News story reports on a notable new joint statement on the topic of capital punishment put together by the Fair and Just Prosecution folks.  First the context from the press:

Fifty-six elected prosecutors from 26 states pledged to work to effectively end the death penalty, including by refusing to support the execution of people with intellectual disabilities, seeking commutations, and helping to overturn sentences in cases of racial bias, negligent defense counsel or other misconduct.

"Many of us have been on the front lines of the effort to reform the American death penalty. Others have witnessed — and in some cases been directly involved in — prosecutorial efforts to seek capital punishment," the joint statement, shared by Fair and Just Prosecution, a bipartisan network of elected prosecutors, said Thursday.  "Although we hold varied opinions surrounding the death penalty and hail from jurisdictions with different starting points on the propriety of this sentence, we have all now arrived at the same inexorable conclusion: our country's system of capital punishment is broken."

The coalition of district attorneys and state attorneys general is made up of mostly Democrats, but includes at least one Republican — Christian Gossett, the district attorney of Winnebago County, Wisconsin — and they hail from some of the largest counties and cities in the country, as well as rural communities.  Eleven of the states they represent still have the death penalty, including Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Texas.

Here are the last two paragraphs from this joint statement:

We are duty-bound to counter these egregious injustices and we pledge to use our power as prosecutors, whenever and however it may be appropriate, to do so.  For those of us in states where the death penalty is still permitted, we will uphold Supreme Court precedent and the interests of justice by refusing to seek the death penalty against people with intellectual disabilities, post-traumatic stress disorder, histories of traumatic brain injury, or other intellectual or cognitive challenges that diminish their ability to fully understand and regulate their own actions.  We will support efforts to identify individuals currently on death row in our jurisdictions who experienced these challenges and to seek commutations or other just resolutions.  We will also support efforts to overturn existing death sentences in cases that feature a colorable claim of innocence, racial bias, egregiously inadequate or negligent defense counsel, discovery violations, or other misconduct that render us unable to stand by the sentence in good faith. This is the bare minimum that justice demands of us.

As elected prosecutors, we serve as ministers of justice and are obligated to seek outcomes that advance equity, fairness, community safety, and the rule of law.  And we are also obligated to reject arbitrariness, racism, and cruelty. We pledge to abide by these obligations by refusing to seek the death penalty against individuals with cognitive impairments or otherwise diminished culpability.  And we further commit to work toward the elimination of our nation’s failed death penalty system, once and for all.