Why exactly are some death penalty opponents resisting the moratorium label?

As detailed in this prior post, the opaque work of the Supreme Court in granting stays since its cert grant in Baze makes it hard to say with great certainty that there is a de facto moratorium on all lethal injection executions now in place.  Nevertheless, I find quite intriguing, as detailed in this post from Karl Keys and from comments here, that various persons who support an end to executions seem eager to avoid using the moratorium label to describe post-Baze developments.

Let’s start with some basic facts.  Partially as a result of the Baze grant and post-Baze developments, there has not been an execution in the United States for nearly a month and more than a dozen scheduled executions in nearly 10 different states have been put on hold.  (A few of these stays pre-date the Baze grant, but the Baze grant essentially ensured the stays would not be undone.)   Perhaps most significantly, Texas, the state responsible for the majority of executions in 2007, has indicated that it won’t even try to go forward with any executions until Baze is decided.

Of course, no formal moratorium has been declared (or really could be declared) by the Supreme Court.  Thus, nobody should believe there is a de jure moratorium that ensures no executions until an outcome in Baze.  But, in the wake of this past week’s stays in Nevada and Virginia and Georgia, I have come comfortably to the conclusion that there is now a de facto moratorium on lethal injection executions.  And though it’s possible that a state will at some point convince the Supreme Court to allow it to go forward with an execution while we await Baze, I still think the label “moratorium” is the most accurate way to describe the extant consequences of the Baze grant and post-Baze developments.

Intriguingly, it appears that death penalty supporter Kent Scheidegger has now begrudgingly accepted the de facto moratorium label.  Why exactly, then, are death penalty opponents eager to resist the moratorium label?

UPDATE: Karl Keys responds here by suggesting it “may be more helpful to ask why call it a moratorium” given that there are “six serious execution dates that have yet to be stayed just in the next 60 days, any one of whom may realistically lead to a fellow human being getting strapped downed to a gurney and poisoned to death.”  My response is that I do not know what other word effectively describes the fact that more than a dozen serious execution dates have been stayed in the last four weeks since the Baze grant.

Karl goes on suggest that calling current events “a moratorium would be to denigrate [the] effort” of defense lawyers working to get stays in cases still with serious execution dates.  On this point, I look at the issue from the other end of the legal uncertainty: by denying the existence of a de facto moratorium, aren’t death penalty opponents indirectly encouraging lower courts NOT to grant stays and encouraging prosecutors to keep pushing capital cases forward. 

In my view, If death penalty opponents were to vocally accept (and vigorously praise) the existence of a de facto moratorium on all lethal injection executions, it would make it a lot easier for defense lawyers to get stays in all still-pending capital cases.  Or, put differently, it seems that denying the existence of a moratorium serves to justify the efforts of those prosecutors and judges seeking to keep the machinery of death well oiled and fully functional despite Baze.