Expanding the (dormant) death penalty

USA Today has this article noting that “at least a half-dozen states are considering broadening the death penalty, countering a national trend toward scaling back its use.”  Here’s more:

Lawmakers have proposed legislation that would increase the range of crimes eligible for execution. In Texas and Tennessee, for example, legislators want to include certain child molesters who did not murder their victims…  Virginia is considering bills that would make accomplices to murder, as well as killers of judges and court witnesses, eligible for the death penalty.

Of course, serious students of the death penalty realize that proposals to expand the death penalty are all about symbolic politics, not serious policy-making.  Tennessee, for example, has executed only two murders in the last 30 years, and the constitutionality of the death penalty for child molesters is uncertain.  Nevertheless, these realities do not diminish the power of pro-death-penalty rhetoric for legislators.

UPDATE:  Crime & Consequences has this extended post stressing that different state proposals to expand the death penalty “vary widely in their merit.”  I do not disagree with this statement, but I would add that at a time when Texas seems to be the only state in the Union seriously committed to carrying out death sentences, efforts in other states to expand who is eligible for the (now almost dormant) ultimate punishment is almost a perverse (and expensive) game of bait-and-switch.